Show individual forces for:     Charge 1 Charge 2 Charge 3 Charge 4

This is like the previous simulation, but this one shows the time evolution of the system. You can get some very interesting patterns, especially if you set the sliders so that two of the particles have a positive charge and two have a negative charge. What are some things that you notice? If two of the particles get into a death spiral, what can you change to get them out?

Note that the simulation slows down by a factor of 10 when two particles get very close together. Even then, the physics may not be exactly right - it's hard to handle infinities well!

Simulation written by Andrew Duffy, and first posted on 4-25-2018.

Creative Commons License
This work by Andrew Duffy is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
This simulation can be found in the collection at http://physics.bu.edu/~duffy/classroom.html.

The counter has been running on this page since 8-12-2018. The number of people accessing the page since then is: