Newton vs. Einstein

Hi Daniel,

I've been reading a bit on the theory of general relativity and was wondering if one could use Kangaroo to explain this concept. Would one be able to "bend the space" in which the forces apply?

It would be quite an abstract function but it would help explaining important concepts in contemporary physics such as black holes (Kangaroo being a great tool to understand laws of physics through applying them).

Not sure if what I am asking makes any sense but I thought it would be interesting to have your point of view.

Many thanks,

Arthur

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Daniel Piker on October 20, 2013 at 5:31am

Hi Arthur,

It could indeed be interesting to play around with physics in curved spaces.

There was a nice game from MIT a while back that allows you to interactively explore relativistic effects:

http://gamelab.mit.edu/games/a-slower-speed-of-light/

I suppose one could replace the current vector library so that whenever it calculated distances it took the metric tensor into account...

I don't think this is something I'll have time for any time soon though!

That said I do think there are applications for some specific 3-manifolds and mappings between them. I recently added to Kangaroo a way to simulate periodic boundary conditions so you can work in a 3-torus (allowing things like relaxing triply periodic minimal surfaces).

The 4d rotation script I posted can also be useful in conjunction with all the circle related geometry optimizations, such as conical meshes, circle packings, etc., because such transformations preserve circles and the angles between them.