How to Simulate the Universe on your Laptop

This is the amazing and beautiful Millennium run - it's a simulation of the large-scale evolution of the universe from just after the big *** all the way to the present. The researchers at the Max Plank Institute in Germany who ran the simulation began with the latest observations of what the early universe looked like - [the cosmic microwave background radiation] and simulated the evolution of the universe forward in time using the laws of physics to see how the galaxies and galactic clusters of today grew out of the tiny fluctuations in the density of the early universe. As a testament to their success, the Millennium simulation looks strikingly similar to the actual universe as shown in the equally impressive 3D map of the universe created by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. But the millennium run was no small feat - it contained over 10 billion simulated particles and ran on over 500 computers for a total of 350,000 hours, or 40 years, of processor time. So not to be outdone, here's my version that I did on my laptop in only a few minutes. And I did the simulation using off-the-shelf video special effects software (in fact, if you want to try this yourself, I believe you can even download a free, fully-functional demo). So how did I simulate the universe on my laptop? Simple - I began with a real image of the universe about 13.7 billion years ago, used it to tell a particle simulator which particles should be lighter and which should be heavier (to simulate the slight variations of density in the early universe), turned on a little bit of gravity, a little bit of friction, and watched the particles go! Now, it's by no means the millennium simulation - for starters, it's only two-dimensional and the gravity isn't physically accurate… but nevertheless, here you have it: the large-scale evolution of the universe as simulated on a laptop. For those of you interested in the particular details of how to make this particle simulation in After Effects, check out the tutorial HERE. And if you just want more minutephysics, click here to check out last week's video about what would happen if we dug a tunnel through the earth and jumped in.