◆ frontier30 mindraft

Thermodynamics from mechanics

Integrate enough particles for long enough and macroscopic quantities emerge from the trajectory. This is where symplectic integration stops being elegant and becomes mandatory.

assumes you already have

Why a worse method gives a better orbit

Planned outline

Pair potentials, cutoffs, neighbour lists, and periodic boundary conditions.
Why velocity Verlet is the universal choice here and RK4 is essentially never used.
Thermostats and barostats, and how they deliberately break symplecticity.
Ergodicity, time averages versus ensemble averages.
Scaling to GPUs, and where the compute actually goes.

Interactives planned

Each numbered point above gets at least one thing you can manipulate, not a figure. See AGENTS.md for the widget vocabulary and the rule that every lesson ships at least one graded interaction and one recall card.