Experimental Demonstration in the Laboratory of the Existence of Magneto-Hydrodynamic Waves in Ionized Helium
Winston H. Bostick · Morton A. Levine
Summary and citation · read the original at the source
In one page
Hannes Alfvén had argued in 1942 that a magnetised conducting fluid can carry a wave along its own field lines — pluck the field, and the matter tied to it swings back, the way a plucked string carries a note. Winston Bostick and Morton Levine set out to show the same thing happening in a gas. Their one-page report in Physical Review, on 15 August 1952, states the result in its title: an experimental demonstration, in the laboratory, of the existence of magneto-hydrodynamic waves in ionized helium. That is the step that carries Alfvén’s idea out of astrophysics and liquid metal and into plasma — matter stripped of some electrons, which is what stars, lightning and every fusion machine are made of. It is also the beginning of Bostick’s own line of work. Four years later, from the same instinct for what magnetised plasma does on its own, he fired ionised matter across a magnetic field and named the self-holding structures it made plasmoids.
Why it matters hereChapter 9 rests on a simple and settled claim — plasma is not a formless gas; it carries waves, holds structure, and organises itself — and this is one of the papers that put the first half of that on the laboratory record. It is also the door into the second half, because the author who demonstrated the waves in helium here is the author who named the plasmoid four years later.
What it claims
01Bostick and Levine report an experimental demonstration, in the laboratory, of the existence of magneto-hydrodynamic waves in ionized helium. Stated plainly: the waves that magnetised matter can carry along its own field lines were made, and detected, in a laboratory plasma.Title, Physical Review 87, issue 4, page 671
Settled physics02The medium is an ionized gas, not a liquid metal. That is the load-bearing word in the title. Magneto-hydrodynamic waves had been argued for and looked for in conducting fluids generally; carrying the demonstration into ionised helium is what makes the result belong to plasma physics, and therefore to everything from the solar corona to a pinch machine.Title, Physical Review 87, issue 4, page 671
Settled physics03The result was published on 15 August 1952 as a single page of Physical Review, volume 87, issue 4 — the short-communication form the journal used for a result the authors wanted on the record quickly. The compression is why no abstract exists for it in any index today.Bibliographic record: Physical Review 87, issue 4, page 671, 15 August 1952
Settled physics04That magneto-hydrodynamic waves — Alfvén waves — travel along magnetic field lines in a conducting medium is settled physics, predicted by Hannes Alfvén in 1942 and confirmed in the laboratory in the years on either side of this paper. Bostick and Levine’s place in that record is the confirmation in an ionised gas.Published record of Alfvén wave discovery, read against this paper’s title
Settled physics05What to watch: this page, and the page it is about. The one-page communication sits behind a subscription and no open copy exists in any index checked on 2026-09-08, so the apparatus, the helium pressure, the magnetic field strength and the measured wave speed are not yet on this site. Any reader who can open Physical Review 87, page 671 can supply them, and this sheet should then be rewritten from the source rather than from its record.Rights note above
What to watch
The way in
https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRev.87.671WHAT THIS PAGE IS WRITTEN FROM. Published as Physical Review volume 87, issue 4, page 671, on 15 August 1952 — a single page, in the compressed form Physical Review used in that era for short communications. The record is closed access under the APS default licence: Unpaywall, OpenAlex and Semantic Scholar all report no open copy, INSPIRE and fatcat hold no record of it, the Internet Archive, NASA’s technical reports server and CORE return nothing, and the publisher’s own page declines automated retrieval. No abstract exists in any index, because Physical Review did not carry abstracts on items of this length in 1952. The source therefore could not be read for this sheet, and no text of it is reproduced here. Everything below is written from the bibliographic record — the authors, the title, the journal, the volume, the issue, the page and the date — read against the published record of the surrounding physics, and each claim says which of the two it comes from. When the page itself can be read, this sheet should be rewritten from it. CONTEXT USED, ATTRIBUTED: Hannes Alfvén predicted magneto-hydrodynamic waves in 1942; Winston Bostick was at Tufts College from 1948 to 1954 working on magnetic pinch effects, and published the plasma-gun and plasmoid work as Experimental Study of Ionized Matter Projected across a Magnetic Field, Physical Review 104, page 292, in 1956.
How to cite it
Winston H. Bostick, Morton A. Levine (1952) Experimental Demonstration in the Laboratory of the Existence of Magneto-Hydrodynamic Waves in Ionized Helium. doi:10.1103/PhysRev.87.671
Where it sits in the curriculum