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Where Toroidal Flow Is Real

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Where Toroidal Flow Is Real

A good deal of what modern sacred geometry says about the torus rests on observations that are simply correct, and those are worth setting out first and separately.

Vortex rings. A smoke ring, the bubble ring blown by a dolphin, the ring rising from a volcanic vent and the ring at the head of a mushroom cloud are all the same object: a body of fluid rotating about a closed circular axis, carrying itself forward, remarkably stable and long-lived. The flow really is toroidal and it really is self-sustaining for as long as viscosity permits.

Magnetic fields. The field of a bar magnet, of a current loop, and of the Earth is a dipole field, and its field lines form nested closed loops sweeping out a toroidal region around the source. The Earth's magnetosphere has that shape before the solar wind stretches it into a tail. The torus is also the geometry chosen for magnetic confinement in fusion research: a tokamak is a toroidal chamber precisely because a field line inside a torus never runs out of chamber to travel along, which a straight tube cannot manage.

Circulating fluids. Hadley circulation in the tropical atmosphere is a toroidal overturning, and convection in a heated fluid organises into rolls of the same kind.

The general principle behind all of these is real and worth stating plainly: any circulating flow that has to return to its own source, in a system possessing an axis, tends toward a toroidal shape. That follows from continuity and from having nowhere else to go. It is a good, genuine result, and it needs nothing added to it.

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