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Physics: Particle Physics
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Physics engines have been commonly used on supercomputers since the 1980's to simulate the flowing of atmospheric air and water, in order to predict weather patterns. This is known as computational fluid dynamics modeling, where particles of air are assigned a force vector, and these combined forces are calculated across vast regions of space to show how the overall weather patterns will circulate. Due to the requirements of speed and high precision, special computer processors known as vector processors were developed to accelerate the calculations.
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Physics is closely related to the other natural sciences and, in a sense, encompasses them. Chemistry, for example, deals with the interaction of atoms to form molecules; much of modern geology is largely a study of the physics of the earth and is known as geophysics; and astronomy deals with the physics of the stars and outer space. Even living systems are made up of fundamental particles and, as studied in biophysics and biochemistry, they follow the same types of laws as the simpler particles traditionally studied by a physicist.
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Physics based character animation in the past only used rigid body dynamics because they are faster and easier to calculate, but modern games and movies are starting to use soft body physics now that it is possible. Soft body physics are ... used for particle effects, liquids and cloth. Some form of limited Fluid dynamics simulation is sometimes provided to simulate water and other liquids as well as the flow of fire and explosions through the air.
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Theoretical physics kept pace in understanding these particles, which compose the atomic nucleus, and their interactions. By the early 1960s physicists knew that in addition to the protons, neutrons, and electrons that had been used to explain atomic nuclei for several decades, there was a confusing number of additional particles that had been found using electron and proton accelerators. A pattern in the structure of the nucleus was discerned by Murray Gell-Mann at the California Institute of Technology and by the Israeli Yuval Ne'eman. Gaps in the pattern were noticed, predictions of a new particle were made, and the particle (the so-called Omega-minus) was promptly discovered. To explain the pattern, Gell-Mann devised a theoretical scheme, called the eightfold way, that attempted to classify the relationship between strongly interacting particles in the nucleus. He postulated the existence of some underlying but unobserved elementary particles that he called "quarks."
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Particle Physics