🎉 We've reached a milestone we've been building towards since the beginning: 1000 interactive physics simulations on MySimulator. Wave 110 added 60 new simulations, pushing us over the line. When we launched with a handful of classical mechanics demos, the idea of 1000 browser-based interactive simulations felt impossibly ambitious. Today it's reality. Here's what's new and how we got here.
New in Wave 110
Wave 110 spans three major new domains that readers had been requesting for some time.
Plasma Physics: High-temperature ionised gas behaviours that underpin both nuclear fusion and space weather. New simulations include plasma confinement dynamics showing how magnetic fields hold energetic ions in a donut-shaped field geometry, a tokamak cross-section visualisation with real-time field line rendering, and Z-pinch instability — the kinking and sausaging of a current-carrying plasma column that makes unconfined plasma so difficult to harness for energy production.
Materials Science: The microscale world of crystalline solids, grain boundaries, and atomic defects. Crystal growth under mechanical stress lets you watch grains nucleate, compete, and either merge or fracture depending on the applied strain rate. Grain boundary migration visualises how the interfaces between crystal grains move under annealing conditions — the basis for heat treatment in metallurgy. Dislocation dynamics models the linear defects in crystal lattices whose motion is responsible for plastic deformation in metals.
Advanced Quantum Mechanics: Building on our existing quantum simulations, Wave 110 adds the quantum harmonic oscillator with adjustable energy levels and probability density visualisation, spin precession showing a magnetic moment processing around an applied field, and quantum entanglement visualisation — a schematic representation of how measuring one entangled particle's spin instantly constrains the other's, regardless of separation.
Highlights: Must-Try New Simulations
With 60 new simulations it's hard to pick favourites, but these four stand out as particularly instructive and visually compelling:
- Plasma Confinement: Watch charged particles spiral along field lines and understand intuitively why fusion confinement is one of engineering's hardest problems. Adjust the field strength and watch the containment improve — or fail catastrophically.
- Crystal Growth: Start with a supersaturated melt and watch dendrites form as atoms snap into the lowest-energy lattice positions. Speed up time to watch recrystallisation, then apply stress to see grain boundary sliding.
- Quantum Tunnelling: Send a wave packet at a potential barrier that a classical particle could never surmount. Adjust the barrier width and height to see how the transmission probability — the quantum tunnel — shrinks to near zero or opens wide.
- Z-Pinch Instability: A beautiful and chaotic simulation showing why the simplest plasma confinement geometry — squeezing a current along its own magnetic field — is terminally unstable. Essential viewing for anyone studying fusion concepts.
How We Got Here: Building 1000 Simulations
In 2023, MySimulator launched with 10 simulations: pendulum, double pendulum, projectile motion, wave interference, Lorenz attractor, Conway's Game of Life, Boids, gas molecules, spring-mass system, and Fourier series. Each ran in a single HTML file with vanilla JavaScript and Canvas 2D. Simple, fast, no dependencies.
Community feedback shaped every subsequent wave. Waves 1–30 filled out classical mechanics and wave physics. Waves 31–60 expanded into quantum mechanics, fluid dynamics, and cellular automata. Waves 61–90 added biology simulations (predator-prey, disease spread, evolution), chemistry (molecular dynamics, reaction diffusion), and astronomy (N-body gravity, orbital mechanics). Waves 91–110 pushed into plasma physics, materials science, and mathematical visualisation.
The shift to WebGL — beginning in Wave 45 for particle-heavy simulations — was the single biggest performance leap. Simulations that were impossible at 60fps with Canvas 2D (fluid dynamics with 50,000 particles, galaxy simulations with 200,000 bodies) became routine. Mobile optimisation arrived in Wave 70: touch controls, responsive layouts, and power-aware frame rate caps for battery preservation.
The rule that hasn't changed since day one: Every simulation runs entirely in your browser. No installation, no plugins, no account required. Click and explore.
Wave 111 is already in development. If there's a simulation domain you'd like to see covered, the feedback form is always open. Thank you for 1000 simulations worth of curiosity.