About Big Bang// I had been playing Osmos for iPhone a lot in this time period, and simultaneously I read an article (June 2011) about a group of scientists creating and retaining antimatter using magnets for over 16 minutes, crushing the previous record of 172 milliseconds. The excitement of this finding was that it is highly theorized that antimatter might exhibit anti-gravity.
I came up with two theories, and I set out to make a computer model to prove them:
- If I create randomly sized particles and spread them randomly in space, and apply nothing but the law of gravity to them, they will eventually gather in such a way that they form their own little orbiting “solar systems”.
- If my first theory is correct, and I also introduce antimatter which exhibits anti-gravity, that both matter and antimatter “solar systems” will form, and also move away from each other, recreating The Big Bang.
I created these little Sprites and gave them each random masses, and based their diameter on as if they were all made of material of the same density and were actually spheres, even though they are only moving in 2D. If two particles get close enough that one of their center points intersects the other, if they are both the same (matter vs. matter or antimatter vs. antimatter) they combine into one particle equal to the sum of their masses. If they are opposites (matter vs. antimatter), they cancel each other out to their opposing masses and leave only the leftover matter or antimatter. And either way, the remaining particle’s trajectory is now adjusted accordingly. Their gravity acts based on their mass, and each particle reacts to each other particle, no matter how far away. Needless to say, this exercise got really processor intensive. Remember Carl Friedrich Gauss from math class? If we had just 10 particles, that means 60 times every second we now have to do (10*(10+1))/2 calculations, which is equal to 10+9+8+7+6+5+4+3+2+1, or 55. And at 20 particles that number goes up to 210. See how fast that number grows? So I was constrained to keeping my number of particles down on the low side. This demo, with its defualt settings, is running this calculation in the neighborhood of 2,000 times onEnterFrame. One side note I found here after much scratching my head, was that the x and y positions of Sprites in AS3 are not precise enough. I had to overwrite the x and y setter and setters and keep my own x and y properties as Numbers, and then move the particle accordingly. Sounds weird, but the whole experiment was just a jumbley mess until I implemented that.
Both my theories were proved. Although I just wish I could do it on a much larger scale. It is really fun to watch over and over though. You see all sorts of different phenomenons happen that happen in real space. You see little particles become “meteors”, that will swing right by a “planet” and fling off into space, and then return much later to do the same thing. If you watch long enough, you will also see these “solar systems” eventually collapse. One of my sisters caught wind of what I was working on and got really mad at me because she thought I was trying to prove that God didn’t exist. Although this wasn’t my motive at all, I guess I kind of did.