2D Motion - Physics 101 / AP Physics 1 Review with Dianna Cowern

When I was about 13 years old (long time ago now) I programmed a space simulator in BASIC that simulated the gravitational forces affecting masses of different sizes in three dimensional space.  I used this same technique of splitting the velocities into their horizontal, vertical and Z vectors and applying the gravitational force equation to each object, in each of the dimensions.  I didn’t know about calculus then so my calculations were very rough but it worked.  The small objects orbited around the big objects.  Objects closer to each other in mass, orbited around a point between them etc.  Because the forces were inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them, things got crazy when the masses got too close to each other and objects were flung away from each other at massive velocities so I added basic collision detection and if the objects were deemed to have collided, the program made one new mass out of the sum of the two colliding bodies.