Reply To: Peak Oil from Truth Out

[krikkitz]

Thank you for responding to my post, M. Di Vita. Although to my knowledge plasmas have never been characterized formally as Chaotic, they do exhibit some characteristics that led me to think along those lines. For one, they show somewhat smooth transitions to doubling states, i.e., formation of sheaths, which reminds me of bifurcation in Chaotic systems. I understand your point regarding a few versus many degrees of freedom. However, in the presence of an emergent strong magnetic field, those degrees of freedom do essentially contract to just a few. The evidence of this is the behavior of the plasma itself in the DPF, in the way the “instabilities” form. This is order arising from chaos, a hallmark of Chaotic systems. Another characteristic of Chaotic systems is some mechanism of feedback. In the case of the DPF, for one, there is strong feedback from the magnetic fields produced by the plasma in the famous “like likes like” way that moving charges attract each other and organize themselves.

I am certainly not an expert in either Chaos or plasma physics (understatement). I simply know if plasma in the DPF is Chaotic, that efforts to suppress turbulence will not work. What I would really love to see is someone who is well versed in Chaos take a crack at characterizing plasma in the DPF with the view in mind that it just might be Chaotic in nature. If it is and someone could identify an equivalent of a Feigenbaum constant, that could save many headaches and a whole lot of money. It’s worth taking a look.