During the Great Plague of London in 1965, Isaac Newton went for a 2 year quarantene in his home in Woolsthorpe, where he layed down the faundation of his later theories on calculus, optics and the law of gravitation. During the last year of the COVID-19 pandemic, the speaker have been working on one of the consequences of Newton's theory of gravitation, and it's relation to time reversibility. In this presentation he will discuss the consequences of chaos in Newton's law of gravity and its consequences for numerical simulations of self-gravitating systems and time travel.
BIO
Simon Portegies Zwart is professor of computational astrophysics at
the Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands. His principal scientific
interests includes high-performance computing, and its applications in astrophysics. This includes parallel algorithms and numerical
integration techniques, but also multi-scale and multi-physics
modeling, the evolution of hierarchical stellar and planetary systems,
and the ecology of dense star clusters.
Host: Chris Ormel
