Thank you, that definitely was an interesting read. Sad to learn of Bill Paxton's passing. Clearly his legacy and impact however live on, like this research dem

Thank you, that definitely was an interesting read. Sad to learn of Bill Paxton's passing. Clearly his legacy and impact however live on, like this research demonstrates. It seems he preferred the term "software instrument" to refer to MESA: > Bildsten and Paxton have taken to calling programs like MESA "software instruments,” according to the latter. “Just like you can’t do observational astrophysics without an instrument like a telescope," he said, "you can’t do computational astrophysics without an instrument such as MESA." It's amazing what impact one good piece of software, freely available to anyone anywhere to use, can have on a field. I think this quote illustrated the problem he was able to solve very well: > Ideally, you want to be able to run an experiment, but you can’t go grab a star, run an experiment for a billion years, and come back later to see how it turned out.