Pure Physicist - A physics simulator app

[sa1988]

There are plenty of physics apps around already but most seem to just be words and pictures. I haven't found many that offer good simulators for proper textbook physics. So I made one.

Pure Physicist - Google Play

The underlying physics 'engine' uses the as yet incomplete University Physics library I started a little while ago (see this thread: https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/open-source-c-physics-library.978770/), which was great fun to use.

The simulations use proper physical values throughout, only scaling up/down at the point where the user is presented with something on the screen (i.e. a charged particle moving at 0.5c is not exactly going to work unless it's passed into the game loop with a scale factor of ~$10^{-8}$ and is drawn as something the human eye can comfortably see). Aside from that, I won't promise that the physics is perfect but I gave it a pretty good shot I hope. Feel free to point out any major errors.



I'm going to add more content and polish things a bit as time goes on.

Oh and it only works on Android. It's cross-platform and does work on iOS, but Apple have shot themselves in the foot with their painfully obstructive procedure for getting apps onto their platform. I've had such trouble trying to submit the app that I've given up and just don't care any more. Sorry iPhone users

 

[jedishrfu]

Your app sounds quite interesting. Often physics apps use game physics which uses approximations sacrificing accuracy for performance.

I know of one collection of java classes that allow programmers to make some good simulations.

The Open Source Physics collection at www.compadre.org/osp

The code is commonly used in Computer Modeling and Simulations courses. The developers wrote a book to accompany the code. Basically, the code has the graphics engines and necessary computational framework leaving you the task of writing the PDEs of the system in code and then running it.

 

[sa1988]

The Open Source Physics collection at www.compadre.org/osp

I have a vague recollection of you (or someone on this forum!) pointing this library out to me before. Unfortunately I can't easily use it because it's Java, and my work is all in C#.

My physics library is doing well so far anyway. Probably isn't as numerically accurate as the one you have suggested, but it's good enough for toying with.

 

[Office_Shredder]

Cool. I think I found a small bug, or maybe this is a real phenomenon of some sort you're modeling...

In the quantum tunneling simulation, if you increase the width of the barrier at the same exact time as a particle is tunneling, it bounces the particle back the other way but it slows down and highlights it white. If you make the barrier thin then set it to max length it's easy to replicate.