The cartoon defining "interchange reconnection," a concept rewarmed for the heliospheric community from older solar ideas (many in this Archive). The paper introducing this idea attempts to explain what the Archivist thinks of as "Gold's paradox," described originally by T. Gold as the quandary associated with the incremental increase of heliospheric open field as a result of CME action. This paradox still seems interesting, and this paper does little in fact to explain it. Part of the problem is in nomenclature, and of course introducing the word "interchange" immediately causes superficial confusion with the concept of the "interchange instability." The solar and heliospheric communities do not mean the same thing by "open field line," and of course any physicist trusting to the reality of field lines in the first place is likely to be heading for confusion. For example, one could argue that if a flux tube contains a wind-type flow (super-Alfvenic) it is open; on the other hand non-thermal tail particles could in principle leave the Sun and then return to it basically within the same flux tube - thus one could say that they are closed.
This exercise at least served to illustrate some of the dangers of cartoon physics, but unfortunately the name caught on and is widely used at present.
Finally, note please how elegant this cartoon is from the point of minimalism. It is a striking contrast with its neighbors to the left and right in the matrix, which are more... florid and turgid, respectively.
March 25, 2007
November 15, 2007