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Author Topic: Time Steppping  (Read 3335 times)

SomeDude

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Time Steppping
« on: May 15, 2011, 01:14:50 AM »
Nice to see someone finally make a simulator like this.  :)

Back in high school on an old black and white macintosh in the early 1990's I made a program in Basic in 2D that did this.  I started out with 2 particles of whatever initial velocities and masses I wanted them to be then animated the particles as 1 black pixel on a white screen.  I got up to 5 particles and the animation started lagging, hehe.

Then I did a time step, same thing, multiplied velocity by 2 and multiplied gravity by 2, time step by 2 by pressing a key.  Then I noticed something in my program which I could never explain to anyone else till now, eventually if I time stepped it far too high then the parabolic orbit would turn in an octagonal shaped orbit and then eventually one thing would shoot off the screen.  Energy would not be conserved.  Linear momentum would not be conserved.

I've always wondered if time is quantized, and something like that could be responsible for radioactivity, or other strange goings on inside the atom.  I went to college studying math and physics for a few years and dropped out of my quantum chromodynamics class, it made absolutely no sense to me.  But I always thought of that program I wrote back in high school, how if time becomes quantized then straaaange things happen.

I also challenge physicists to try to model an atom this way, without cheating, or using any pre-deterministic programming. 1 simple hydrogen atom would be sufficient, try to model the hydrogen atom using Strong, Eletromagnetic, Weak, and Gravity.  I bet it can't be done.