To Progress is Human

In the past two weeks, I worked more on my Dark Matter simulation. I added the Earth, which is orbiting around the sun. Furthermore, I was able to track the path the sun and the Earth makes around the center of the universe by putting a button on the simulation that can make the background disappear. When I looked at the path at the first time, I thought I had done something wrong, because the path of the earth is creating a shape that I never seen before. Dr. Bellis laughed at my reaction and say that it is correct, I had created a simulation that shows the epicycles (the circular orbits of an object that orbits around another orbiting object) without knowing what epicycles are.

Epicycles

Below are the paths of the Sun and Earth that is shown on my simulation
Blue- Earth's path, Orange- Sun's path
High--> low velocity

We then spend some time at Dr. Cummings', who is also a professor at the Particle physics department, office. Dr. Bellis excitingly shared what I made with Dr. Cummings and they both got really excited and say that they are going to use them in the Astronomy class at Siena. In this office of excitement, I suddenly saw a group of Chinese girls went by. I stared and found out that they were Sherry, Claire, Irene, Etheal, etc and were there for the AMC test. After that incident, Dr. Bellis, Dr. Cummings, and I continued to discuss about our simulation. Dr. Cummings gave us some advice on how to make a graph that will track the amount of dark matter detected on Earth over time change. This is a challenge, because Processing is a program that is mostly used for art and animations rather than science, so Dr. Bellis and I could not find example of how to make a graph on Processing. We realized that we will have to write codes that will draw tiny line segments to create line or curved line graph. 

To practice drawing a graph on Processing, Dr. Bellis showed me how to create a sine curve. He gave me this code that will repeatedly do things over a number of times. Using this code I was able to create a coordinate system on the simulation. Firstly, I drew the x and y axis. Secondly, I drew the tick marks that have numbers on its side by using the code which adds a certain distance to the position of each line segment as "i" (like 'n' in a sequence/series formula) increases. Thirdly, I drew a new sine graph, also using the new codes, with starting point on the end of my x-axis. 

Sine curve on a coordinate system (not to scale)

 It looks very simple but the progress of figuring out how to do it just by looking at sample is actually really difficult. The next thing I did was to draw exponential curves on the coordinate system I created (just copy and past the codes for the ticks and axis to a new file :P and figure out how to make the codes repeatedly draw line segments of the exponential curve). 

The simulations and codes are on the website: http://www.sos.siena.edu/~mbellis/ew_processing/spring_2013.html

Feel free to play with the orbits by using the buttons that changes the speed of the orbiting objects! :)