To upriver's offering.
Recent increases in supercomputing power... have enabled kinetic simulations of plasmas at unprecedented resolutions
OK, how about, we start with a simple cloud.
Clouds are clouds of positive ions, that cling together as a cell.
(Water in the air magnetizes to the ions, and once "crystallized" around the ions, refract sunlight, enabling us to see the cloud.)
Within the cloud, the ions are moving around. But when they reach the edge of the cloud, the double layer turns the ions back into the cloud. Double layers are polarity boundaries, which ions need a lot of energy to cross. You should have heard about them by now.
Anyhow, a cloud is a very simple everyday thing. Now the challenge is, describe it mathematically.
Whoops, my cloud's double layer just broke, and now filaments are coming out of the side of it. Let me just adjust my sums to describe what just happened, and what is happening now.
Can you not see how this math will be a difficult thing, even with a super supercomputer?
They will be able to simulate simple theoretical plasmas at high resolution, maybe even laboratory controlled plasmas,
but to simulate a real live naturally formed plasma, first you have to take a lot of measurements, which will be very difficult to obtain.
Simulating theoretical plasmas is a start though.
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To JouniJokela's offering.
Your very first line sounded logical and reasonable,
but by the end of your post, you had showed us where purely mathematical theories can lead.
Without math, we have nothing.
The physical sciences have got a lot of math today, but they still cannot say what gravity and charge are. They got nothing. They have no mechanical explanation. Just a lot of math.
And when the math don't work, they add another layer. Normalize the data. Make it fit what we don't really know yet, but presume.
Quantum mechanics is the perfect example.
Everything is virtual messenger particles and probabilities. Even colours. But there is no mechanics.
The even say, for their excuse, that the mechanics can't be known at the quantum level.
They are wholly dependent upon their heuristic maths, and hodge podge for theory.
And like you showed us, one can start out with a completely different set assumptions, and make maths that fits.
I have yet to read your links.
Here is
one you might like in the meantime.
~Paul