Fanfan 🐻 nihiliste ✋️🔺️🤚 on Nostr: It wasn't a rigorous derivation, just a phenomenological argument. And there was ...

It wasn't a rigorous derivation, just a phenomenological argument. And there was another 10 years of paucity of results on the subject (remember we didn't have computers that could do any of this back then). In the late 60s and 70s, then, Eastern German theoreticians, Steenbeck, Krause & Radler, russian theoreticians, people like Ya B. Zel'dovich, of fame in so many areas of astrophysics, and Viktor Kazantsev, another irishman, Robert Kraichnan (who was also the last postdoc of Einstein), and a scottish mathematician, Keith Moffatt, came up with the first analytical derivations of the alpha effect derived from the fluid and Maxwell equations. This was a big breakthrough ! Initially the Germans, who where the first on this but were isolated in their country, published in German and it is another british man, Paul Roberts, who later discovered their work and had it translated in English in 1971 thanks to the help of Michael Stix, another german solar physicist. Their original paper has gothic letters in the equations, see for yourself.