Fanfan 🐻 nihiliste ✋️🔺️🤚 on Nostr: Then, it meant we had to wait for the big CRAY supercomputers in the early 80s to try ...

Then, it meant we had to wait for the big CRAY supercomputers in the early 80s to try numerical simulations of the dynamo effect. And the first one was done by...French people 🐓 🇫🇷 : Meneguzzi, Frisch and Pouquet, in 1981 (known as MFP81). The grid resolution was very limited (32^3 and 64^3), but just doing this kind of stuff at the time could heat a whole university for a year -- I'm barely exaggerating. Anyways, Maurice Meneguzzi and co showed that the alpha effect was not just a phenomenological fantasy of Parker, or a calculational mistake of the soviet and easter german physicists who had to use very crude perturbative math techniques to get to a result (and there was no guarantee this worked). And that meant, for the first time: signal, beautiful dataviz, quantitative analysis ! Judge for yourself.