In his Autobiographical Notes in 1949, Einstein wrote of the special theory It is striking that the theory introduces two kinds of physical things, i.e., (1) measuring rods and clocks, and (2) all other things, e.g., the electromagnetic field, the material point, etc. In the last blog entry, we set the measuring rods to picometers … More Keeping Track of Energy Levels, Photon Emissions and Absorbsions
The question of why an electron does not fall into the middle of a proton, constantly emitting radiation on the way in is a common topic. Here, we take a slightly different approach to the same problem. We animate the motions of electrons and protons using Coulomb’s law, and slowly move to smaller and smaller … More Why Doesn’t an Electron Fall into the Middle of a Proton?
Falling into a gravitational singularity presents a difficult challenge when animating the laws of physics. Although not discussing quite the same aspect of motion, Richard Feynman in The Character of Physical Law (1965) sums things up It always bothers me that according to the laws as we understand them today, it takes a computing machine an infinite number of … More Modelling Black Holes and Singularities
My last entry dealt with lessons learned while building a gravity animation. The animation works just like frames in a movie. Between each frame, the gravitational force between objects is calculated displayed on the screen as “Force”. This force is added to the current motion (momentum) of the object. The motion is added to the prior location of the object to get the … More Adding Relativity to Gravity Animations
This entry is about programming computer animations based on the laws of physics. Gravity is probably one of the easiest and most fun computer animations to work on. Set a bunch of objects in motion and see what happens. Maybe add in a size for the objects and get some crashes, or add some walls and see these … More Lessons Learned from Gravity Animations
Animated Physics 