Reply To: Look at this

[jamesr]

zapkitty wrote:

… he stipulates that “fuel must be injected in small quantities in order to prevent uncontrolled magnetic reconnection” – i don’t think this should be much of a problem seeing as there is no such thing as magnetic reconnection!

Is there a magnetic reconnection conspiracy?… 🙂

The simple MHD fluid models do not fit observations of reconnection very well (for example in the tail of Earth’s magnetosphere causing bursts in auroral activity).
But newer extended Hall & two-fluid models are much closer. To fully capture the dynamics of reconnection you need a fully kinetic simulation, that can cope will relativistic electrons. Which some 2D computer simulations can now do for simple scenarios, but large full 3D ones are still a few years away.

If you want to see some simple animations of magnetic reconnection have a look at:
http://www.astro.virginia.edu/VITA/ATHENA/cs.html