What Would Make a Fun and Useful Physics App?

[mrxyz]

I'm looking for one. Something that would be useful and fun to develop at the same time.

What would you like for a physics related app?

 

[DennisN]

The first thing that popped up in my head was a gravitation simulator (I've programmed things like that a long time ago - it was fun - only Newtonian gravity, though);

You could plot different objects with different masses and let them interact (but you will have to fiddle with the units to get nicely timing, not too slow, not too fast). And you could make the screen torus-like; objects going off the screen to the left appear coming in from the right (and vice versa), and the same thing for up/down.

I don't know if you will be programming for cell phones (the screens may be somewhat small for this, don't know), but it would be a cool application for pads or computer screens.

Anyway, it's just a suggestion. Another thing, maybe not so fancy, but very useful, would be a flexible unit converter (mass/weights, distances, time, temperature etc). I could give you plenty more suggestions, but if I was you, I would try something I'm interested in. So what do you like in science/physics?

 

[mrxyz]

What I like in Science/Physics is the cool stuff. How you can travel in time by moving at fast speeds, the bigness of everything out there and the future of the Universe.

I'm usually not interested in abstract things like developing a gravity simulator - my understanding of physics is that that can be found in mainstream documentaries so I think my ability to develop that/understand all the equations involved may be too much for a computing project.

Your second idea sounds good though. I'm also hoping for the idea to be something that gets more people into Science via an app or at least raise some interest - which I don't think a unit converter will do albeit being a great idea for an application.

 

[DennisN]

What I like in Science/Physics is the cool stuff.

Everything in physics is cool!

No problem, I think I understand . I will think about it for a while, and get back to you...

 

[mrxyz]

Ah, Thank you Dennis. I really appreciate that. :)

 

[DennisN]

Idea 1: Twin Paradox Calculator (Relativity)
I would ask folks in the Relativity forum about this, I see they often like to draw diagrams, and some do animations too.

Idea 2: Something related to orders of magnitude, perhaps something like:
Example: The Scale Of The Universe
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_%28length%29

(You know what? I built a website once about 40 or so orders of magnitude of length, but the site is not up anymore (no server) - it's a real shame, it would have been useful now.)

Idea 3: Regarding the future of the Universe, the basic equations are not terribly difficult, if I remember correctly - I recently saw a thread in the Astronomy & Cosmology forum about it, but I could not locate it now. But I'm not sure what kind of app that would be suitable for this, but the folks in the Astronomy & Cosmology forum might have an idea.

 

[DennisN]

By the way, when I thought about an orders of magnitude app, you may feel that zooming in/out - like "The Scale of The Universe" does - seems difficult.

But it would be cool with an app which just showed some image and/or text for each order of magnitude (along with the length scale) where the user would click "left" to go to next smaller scale and "right" to go to next larger scale (or maybe click up/down, don't know).

 

[mrxyz]

Actually - the orders of magnitude app will be so simple. In fact it would be too simple for the type of project I'm doing. Something with the future of the Universe thing will be great but can't think of what exactly would make a good app out of that.

 

[Office_Shredder]

I don't really understand what "future of the universe" means in this context.

 

[Aero51]

A Navier-Stokes solver with vector field visualization.

 

[DennisN]

I don't really understand what "future of the universe" means in this context.

I don't know what mrxyz was thinking about, but my thinking was something along the lines of

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_fate_of_the_universe#Role_of_the_shape_of_the_universe
• https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=634757
• http://www.einsteins-theory-of-relativity-4engineers.com/CosmoLean_A20.html