NBodyPhysics is a website devoted to my attempts to keep the part me that loves physics engaged. I studied both software engineering and physics and chose to work in software development out of economic pragmatism.

I continue to be fascinated by physics but I recognize that the only way to really understand is to USE physics. The projects described here are a combination of my desire to use physics and learn new technologies.

Some Highlights:

Gravity Engine is a Unity Asset (tool for game developers) that provides extensive support for N-body gravitational simulations.

Chaotic Motion is a Unity Asset that shows the evolution of choatic systems. It also provides examples of how to use the Unity job system.

GRTensorIII is a Maple (symbolic math) package to do component tensor calculations for researchers doing general relativity calculations. It was created with Denis Pollney and Kayll Lake in the 90’s as part of my PhD. It has been fully refreshed with some UI updates and the addition of hypersurface/junction capabilities. It is available from github.

ThreeBody (iOS) explores the gravitational three-body problem. Close encounter handling is crucial, so I re-coded some 1970s FORTRAN from the N-body expert Aarseth to regularize the close approaches and remove numerical instabilities.

NBody is an iPad-only app that shows orbital mechanics puzzles. It was written from scratch in OpenGL and Objective-C. It is no longer available.

Spinor was an exploration of the chaos in a magnet toy that had been sitting on my desk for years. It was my first foray into the Unity game engine. (iOS)

Geodesic Asteroids (iOS) was developed from the idea that the video game Asteroids can be viewed as being on the surface of a torus. This allowed me to study the geodesic equations on T2 and implement them. It was developed in Unity.