History
Before it became possible to simulate molecular dynamics with computers, some undertook the hard work of trying it with physical models such as macroscopic spheres. The idea was to arrange them to replicate the properties of a liquid. J.D. Bernal said, in 1962: "... I took a number of rubber balls and stuck them together with rods of a selection of different lengths ranging from 2.75 to 4 inches. I tried to do this in the first place as casually as possible, working in my own office, being interrupted every five minutes or so and not remembering what I had done before the interruption." Fortunately, now computers keep track of bonds during a simulation.
Following the earlier successes of Monte Carlo simulation with materials, the method was developed by Alder and Wainwright in the 50s and Rahman (independently) in the 60s .
Read more about this topic: Molecular Dynamics
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The visual is sorely undervalued in modern scholarship. Art history has attained only a fraction of the conceptual sophistication of literary criticism.... Drunk with self-love, criticism has hugely overestimated the centrality of language to western culture. It has failed to see the electrifying sign language of images.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)
“While the Republic has already acquired a history world-wide, America is still unsettled and unexplored. Like the English in New Holland, we live only on the shores of a continent even yet, and hardly know where the rivers come from which float our navy.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“America is the only nation in history which, miraculously, has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization.”
—Attributed to Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929)