Physics & Astronomy Applets

I've written a small number of Java applications (sometimes applets that can be buried in a browsers, sometimes standalone applications) that I've used in classes over the years. A few of them are below.

These things require Java. If you try to run them as an applet in the browser, they require the Java plug-in; Google for it if you don't already have it in your browser. If you download them to run then, you'll need to have Java installed on your system; you may well have it already. If not, it's available for zero cost, and can be found at http://java.com/getjava.

Make sure you have at least Java version 1.6 (also known as Java 6) for everything below to work.

Spiral Galaxy Rotator

A very astute student who was in my first introductor astronomy class asked, when I told them about the rotation curve of Spiral Galaxies, "why don't the spiral arms wrap up"? I wrote this applet in an attempt to demonstrate to those who couldn't see it why this would seem to be an issue.

Wave Play

A toy for demonstrating wave interference. Set up sources of sin waves that propagate left and right, and watch them interfere!

1d-Schrödinger Solver

An application that uses the JSci libraries to solve the one-dimensional time-independent Schrödinger equation for a handful of built-in potentials.