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Volume 12: Pages 531-569, 1999

The Strange and Checkered Career of Carrington's Law: A Century and a Half of Solar Modeling

Tom Franzel

2210 Cobbler Ct. NW, Salem, Oregon 97304 U.S.A.

In the inaugural year of (1988), the present author contributed a two-part paper (1, 184–208, 213–243). The paper concluded with a list of twelve brief discursive statements addressed to foundational issues in physics (pp. 238–240). This “research program” or preliminary hypothesis sprang from a mixture of physical, philosophical, and deconstructive historical arguments, all of which had been marshaled in the paper. In the present follow‐up paper, it is argued that evidence from solar physics, then either unknown to the author or not yet firmly established, may provide additional support for the earlier proposed hypothesis. While reader familiarity with the first paper is desirable, the present paper can be read alone.

Keywords: unobservable, underdetermined by the data, social construction of knowledge, differential rotation, solar dynamo, dissipation or circulation, the universe as a perfectly reversible thermodynamic engine

Received: July 26, 1999; Published online: December 15, 2008