Fanfan, gourours on Nostr: Since then, a long time has passed. I'll spare you the incremental, struggling story ...

Since then, a long time has passed. I'll spare you the incremental, struggling story of dynamo theory in the 1980s and 1990s. the people interested in the Earth magnetic field also got at it. In 1995 notably, a PhD student of gilman, Gary Glatzmeier made the cover of Nature with a massive 3D simulation of the geodynamo. It was also not in the right regime, but much more convincing than the original 1980s stuff, and it was a big success story at the time. in 2001, the Karlsruhe dynamo experiment (machine illustrated earlier) was successful with producing a convincing large-scale field from small-scale constrained helical flow of liquid metal through an alpha effect. In 2007, it was the turn of the French to do this in Cadarache with a much more convincing turbulent flow of liquid sodium. A liquid metal washing machine called VKS.

It's a fun story. It was a very big team with three main labs involved, but Romain Monchaux, a PhD student at the time, is the first author of the french paper in PRL, by pure chance, because they had a team policy to have the name of the authors rotate.