Einführung in die Programmierung für Physiker – WS 2013 / 14 – Marc Wagner

≪The study of gravity has led to many revolutions in science, from Newtonian Dynamics to General Relativity to Quantum Field Theory. Despite these advances, however, gravity continues to puzzle scientists. In the 17 century, Sir Isaac Newton was able to successfully model the gravitational force on a macroscopic scale, but in the succeeding 400 years physicists have made little progress in understanding the precise nature of this elusive force. Determining the gravitational force exerted by an object is fairly trivial; however, trying to model gravitational interactions between multiple objects quickly becomes nearly impossible. The simplest case, the two-body problem, is the most complicated gravitational interaction that can be fully understood without some basic and unrealistic assumptions≫.