Hannes Alfvén

Also known as Hannes Olof Gösta Alfvén, Hannes Alfven, Olof Johannesson, Hannes Olof Gosta Alfvén

Swedish electrical engineer, plasma physicist and science fiction author (1908–1995), winner of the 1970 Nobel Prize for Physics

AI overview

Hannes Alfvén was a Swedish scientist and writer who made groundbreaking discoveries in plasma physics—the study of ionized gases—and won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1970 for his work in this field. His contributions to understanding how charged particles behave in magnetic fields have had important applications in everything from astrophysics to fusion energy research, making him a central figure in twentieth-century physics.

AI-generated from the Wikipedia summary — may contain errors.

In the Vinony graph

Hannes Alfvén is indexed among the 230 entries in Vinony's Nobel Prize in Physics collection. It also appears in Nobel Laureates.

Within Vinony's link graph, Hannes Alfvén is referenced by 559 other articles, and connects out to plasma, electrical engineering and Anthony James Leggett.

It sits within the topics 1908 births, 1995 deaths and 20th-century Swedish astronomers.

Its subject is documented across 77 Wikipedia language editions.

Person · Open Library

Born: 1908
Died: 1995
Works: 15

Top works

Interstellar clouds and the formation of stars
Investigations on the ultra-short electro-magnetic waves
Observations and hypotheses in cosmology
Hydromagnetics of the magnetosphere
Worlds-antiworlds; antimatter in cosmology

via Open Library + Wikidata

Music · MusicBrainz

Type: Person
Gender: Male
Origin: Sweden
Active from: 1872-05-01
Active to: 1960-05-08

classicalcomposerconductorswedish composerviolinist

Discography

Discogs Stream

via MusicBrainz · CC0

Listeners · Last.fm

Listeners: 10
Total plays: 23

via Last.fm · Hannes Alfvén

Recent publications · Crossref

5 total works indexed

Reproducible, interactive, scalable and extensible microbiome data science using QIIME 2
· 2019 · cited 20,908x
A climbing image nudged elastic band method for finding saddle points and minimum energy paths
· 2000 · cited 20,641x
A fast and robust algorithm for Bader decomposition of charge density
· 2006 · cited 10,237x
Improved tangent estimate in the nudged elastic band method for finding minimum energy paths and saddle points
· 2000 · cited 9,060x
Room-Temperature Ultraviolet Nanowire Nanolasers
· 2001 · cited 8,388x

via Crossref · CC0

Quotes

“We should remember that there was once a discipline called natural philosophy. Unfortunately, this discipline seems not to exist today. It has been renamed science, but science of today is in danger of losing much of the natural philosophy aspect.”
“Scientists tend to resist interdisciplinary inquiries into their own territory. In many instances, such parochialism is founded on the fear that intrusion from other disciplines would compete unfairly for limited financial resources and thus diminish their own opportunity for research.”
“I have never thought that you could obtain the extremely clumpy, heterogeneous universe we have today, strongly affected by plasma processes, from the smooth, homogeneous one of the Big Bang, dominated by gravitation.”
“There is no rational reason to doubt that the universe has existed indefinitely, for an infinite time. It is only myth that attempts to say how the universe came to be, either four thousand or twenty billion years ago.”
“Most people today still believe, perhaps unconsciously, in the heliocentric universe ... every newspaper in the land has a section on astrology, yet few have anything at all on astronomy.”
“I have no trouble publishing in Soviet astrophysical journals, but my work is unacceptable to the American astrophysical journals.”

via Wikiquote · CC BY-SA

Nobel Prize

The Nobel Prize in Physics1970
“for fundamental work and discoveries in magnetohydro-dynamics with fruitful applications in different parts of plasma physics”
Shared · 1/2 portion

NobelPrize.org →

Wikidata facts

Image: YoungAlfven.jpg

Show 7 more facts

pseudonym: Olof Johannesson
birth name: Hannes Olof Gösta Alfvén
Commons category: Hannes Alfvén
date of birth: 1908-05-30
date of death: 1995-04-02
Erdős number: 5
name in native language: Hannes Alfvén

Sources (10)

via Wikidata · CC0

~12 min read

Encyclopedic overview

Hannes Olof Gösta Alfvén ( Swedish: [alˈveːn]; 30 May 1908 – 2 April 1995) was a Swedish electrical engineer, plasma physicist and winner of the 1970 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on magnetohydrodynamics (MHD). He described the class of MHD waves now known as Alfvén waves. He was originally trained as an electrical power engineer and later moved to research and teaching in the fields of plasma physics and electrical engineering. Alfvén made many contributions to plasma physics, including theories describing the behavior of aurorae, the Van Allen radiation belts, the effect of magnetic storms on the Earth's magnetic field, the terrestrial magnetosphere, and the dynamics of plasmas in the Milky Way galaxy.

Education

Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Hannes Alfvén” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.