Fanfan 🐻 nihiliste ✋️🔺️🤚 on Nostr: So, there was theory, and there were experiments. And, at the same time, thanks to ...

So, there was theory, and there were experiments. And, at the same time, thanks to the insights of people like american mathematician John von Neumann, there were computers. Numerical simulation of fluid flow started in the 1960s too, and it started to be applied to magnetohydrodynamics and the dynamo in the early 1980, later than in climate science (you should read Steve Easterbrook (npub1eak…ha4p) book on how the climate computations started, it makes for a super interesting read). Why ? well, you can already do basic things to model the fluid motions of the Earth atmosphere using 1D simulations. You can't for dynamo. Because of f* Thomas Cowling and his ilk, who told us dynamos only work in 3D (Zel'dovich and many others found many variants on the original Cowling antidynamo theorems, so many theorems that it became a national sport in the UK applied maths community to have one named after you -- my former postdoc supervisor, Michael Proctor, was one of them).