Why Astronomy needs Numerical Experiments.
How do biologists determining the life cycle of a monarch butterfly:
- They put some in a cage.
- Watch them breed.
- Lay eggs.
- Hatch.
- And grow.
- We cannot do that in Astronomy.
- Change happens too slowly.
- For example, the Earth took ~60 million years to form.
- So, we run experiments on the computer.
- We build software that has the important physics in it.
- We invent the initial conditions.
- Run them through the code.
- Compare results to what we currently see.
- goto 1
