About Simplex Universe

I have been fascinated at the laws of nature and how the world around us works since I was a young boy. Yet, as many young individuals like myself at that age come to realize, the concepts of physics become harder and harder to visualize and understand as you dive deeper and deeper into classical mechanics, relativity, and of course quantum mechanics. I naturally looked toward computational software to show me what these phenomena actually look and behave like, but all of the programs I found were bulky, complicated, and not free. I often found myself wishing I had a program where I could "play God" with my own dynamical laws and see how my universe might appear and behave differently than the one I was used to experiencing on a day to day basis. As I began my college years at the University of West Florida, I revisited these questions and began writing molecular dynamics simulations in C# to model things like classical gravity and would then tweak the gravitational constant, give some objects negative mass, or modify the force equation itself to see what new structures were created and how they differed from the original model. As I started doing computational physics research for my university, I noticed that most research groups were programming their simulations from the ground up, which wasted a lot of valuable coding time on the basics rather than the real core of their research. Slowly my simulations became more and more abstract until I developed a sort of common framework to make coding new simulations rather simple. As the project moved from 2D to 3D visualization, I decided to program my own 3D plotting engine. Simplex Universe would end up being the result of two years of this framework's evolution.

Simplex Universe is an open source abstract n-body simulation program that allows anyone interested in learning physics (or just having fun) to play around with the laws of nature in their own miniature universe. Simplex Universe also helps real research groups program their physical simulations faster by providing a common framework to build their code on that will be constantly extended, modded, and validated by the open source community.

To learn a bit more about my project and watch its progress go to: http://www.simplexuniverse.cf/