Inspiration
We thought for 'travelling through time' it would be good to showcase the timeline of how a major event unfolded, and this is where we landed Inspiration came largely from other simulations, such as John Conway's Game of Life, and how awesome our A-level teachers made the history of the universe sound
What it does
It simulates the beginning of the universe! Starting with a few beams of gamma energy, undergoing pair production and creating quarks, which combine into protons and neutrons, all while the universe expands around it!
How we built it
Using the unity game engine, not using the in-built physics engine
Challenges we ran into
Laws of physics are arbitrary when your atoms are measured in pixels, so there was a lot of playing around with numbers that controlled things such as strength of electromagnetic attraction. However, changing these numbers often meant that the program would break in unpredictable ways, remaining broken after changing the numbers back to what they originally were
Accomplishments that we're proud of
- Optimising our program from a 3 second per frame mess into a (fairly) smooth-running program despite the volume of particles
- Working well together to figure out efficient solutions to the problems we were brainstorming
- None of us gave up!
What we learned
The unity game engine; using GitHub collaboratively; we take sleep for granted; a good few physics equations; as well as a load of useful experience with C# and programming in general
What's next for The Big Bang Theory
The next steps would be to simulate the strong force, the thing holding atoms together, and try to configure the simulation to create such atoms, past that point you have to zoom out quite a bit to see much interesting happen
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