lol

can u imagine an engine that could do all this? or allow u to go as "deep" as u wish? i can :D

[edited by - original vesoljc on June 29, 2003 11:22:51 AM]

quote:

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Original post by SuperCheetah
Also, how hard would if be to simulate this? Or has it already been done?

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It would be extremely difficult. Feynman wrote about it in his 1982 article "Simulating Physics with Computers". I could not find an online version of it. The basic idea is that simulating a physical system using quantum mechanics for a time period t requires f(t) computing time, were f(t) grows exponentially on t.

This is the origin of the idea of quantum computers. If that system is so difficult to simulate with a computer, we can use it to compute, and for some class of problems, it would be much faster than a classic computer. I''m not an expert, so take this comment with a grain of salt, and do some research on your own.

The purpose of my program is to study how atoms interact with each other and what would happen if you were to build nanostructures. In particular to study the strengths and weaknesses of the structures. I would like to leave as much quantum mechanics as possible out of the program, but I suppose I would need some to realistically simulate this behavior.

Also, I plan on eventually making this program a distributed application so computing time might not be too much of a problem.

In that case, you can ignore gravity.

For many cases however, you probabaly can''t ignore van der Waal''s, hydrogen or dipole interactions. They can probably be approximated with a fairly simple force vs. radius distance relation for every atom (acting on every other atom) though. The hard part will be the interactions of electrons and bonding. ''Bonds'' in chemistry were usually abstracted as a pairing of electrons. The actual physics behind this, (and in particular, the physics of the angles and distances and such and how they all mutually interact to determine the shape of the molecule) are somewhat dependent on quantum mechanics. For example, can you calculate the angles between the hydrogen atoms in a water molecule? Or how they change due to the presence of other atoms nearby or the rate / type of vibration they experience? This might be doable with only electromagnetism to a decent approximation, but I doubt it...

Or maybe you can?

http://www.colorado.edu/physics/2000/introduction.html