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Asked by slamdunkeroo to Sam on 17 Jun 2013.
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Sam Geen answered on 17 Jun 2013:
One of the things that helped me “get” physics was putting the equations that we’d learned into a computer and seeing them actually work – if you put Newton’s laws of motion into a computer, you can get bouncing balls, orbiting planets, etc. So a great way to see how galaxies form is to actually make one on a computer. A normal desktop or laptop is easily fast enough to make a simple galaxy, even if it can’t reach the resolution we get on supercomputers. So if you want to understand what a galaxy is and how it evolves, why not make one?
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Comments
slamdunkeroo commented on :
fair enough. since when have these computers been in use?
Sam commented on :
Well, the computers keep getting replaced with faster ones. The one I’m using arrived in 2010, I think. People started doing science on computers soon after they were invented, though the programs they used were much simpler. The first computer simulations were done by the Manhattan project to find out how atom bombs would explode.