<blockquote>'
Irving Langmuir was probably the most fascinating man of the plasma pioneers. As his biographers describe him, he was far from being a narrow-minded specialist. His curiosity was all-embracing, his enthusiasm indiscriminate. He liked whatever he looked upon, and he looked everywhere. He was not far from the ideal which Roederer, in a recent paper (1985), contrasts with the insulated specialists that dominate science today.'</blockquote>
Double Layers in AstrophysicsMarch 17-19, 1986
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The Mystery of the Shrinking Red Star)
<blockquote>'M. Azar has studied how a number of the most used textbooks in astrophysics treat important concepts like double layers, critical velocity, pinch effects and circuits. He has found that students using these textbooks remain essentially ignorant of even the existence of these, in spite of the fact that some of them have been well known for half a century [e.g., double layers (Langmuir, 1929) and pinch effect (Bennett, 1934)]. The conclusion is that astrophysics is too important to be left in the hands of the astrophysicists. The billion-dollar telescope data must be treated by scientists who are familiar with laboratory and magnetospheric physics and circuit theory, and of course with modem plasma theory. At least by volume the universe consists of more than 99 percent of plasma, and electromagnetic forces are 10^39 times stronger than gravitation.'
- Double Layers in Astrophysics, page 1
<center><b>B. Birkeland</b></center>
'At the turn of the century geophysicists began to be interested in electrical discharges, because it seemed possible that the aurora was an electrical discharge. Anyone who is familiar with electrical discharges in the laboratory and observes a really beautiful aurora cannot avoid noting the similarity between the multi-colored flickering light in the sky and in the laboratory. Birkeland was the most prominant pioneer. He made his famous terrella experiment in order to investigate this possibility (Birkeland, 1908). Based on his experiments and on extensive observations of aurora in the auroral region, he proposed a current system which is basically the same as is generally accepted today. However, the theory of electric discharges was still in a very primitive state, and the importance of double layers was not obvious.
When Sydney Chapman began his investigations on magnetic storms and aurora one or two decades later, he proposed a current system [the Chapman and Vestime system (Chapman and Vestine, 1938)] which was located entirely in the ionosphere. His most important argument against Birkeland's atmosphere there was a vacuum, relation between Chapman and Birkeland is analyzed by Dessler (1983)]'
- Double Layers in Astrophysics, page 5
<center><b>C. Langmuir and Plasma</b></center>
'The interest in double layers made a great leap forward when Langmuir began his investigaitons. He introduced the term "plasma" in his paper "Oscillation in Ionized Gases" (Langmuir and Tonks, 1929a; see also Langmuir and Tonks, 1929b). Curiously enough, he does not give any motivation for choosing this word, which was probably borrowed from medical terminology. He just states: "We shall use the name 'plasma' to describe this region containing balanced charges of ions and electrons." His biograhpers do not give any explanation either. Langmuir also made the first detailed analyses of double layers (Langmuir, 1929).
Irving Langmuir was probably the most fascinating man of the plasma pioneers. As his biographers describe him, he was far from being a narrow-minded specialist. His curiosity was all-embracing, his enthusiasm indiscriminate. He liked whatever he looked upon, and he looked everywhere. He was not far from the ideal which Roederer, in a recent paper (1985), contrasts with the insulated specialists that dominate science today.
Langmuir once wrote, "Perhaps my most deeply rooted hobby is to understand the mechanism of simple and familiar phenomena..." and the phenomena might be anything from molecules to mountains. One of his friends said, "Langmuir is a regular thinking machine: put in facts and you get out a theory." And the facts his always active brain combined were anything from electrical discharges and plasmas to biological and geophysical phenomena. Science as fun was one of his cardinal tenets.
From this one gets the impression that he was very superficial. This is not correct. He got a Nobel prize in chemistry because he was recognized as the father of surface chemistry. He knew enough of biology to borrow the term plasma from this science, and the mechanism of double layers from surface chemistry. Langmuir's probes were of decisive value for the early exploration of plasmas and double layers, and they are still valuable tools.'
- Double Layers in Astrophysics, page 5</blockquote>