GasLab—an Extensible Modeling Toolkit for Connecting Micro-and Macro-properties of Gases

Abstract

Computer-based modeling tools have largely grown out of the need to describe, analyze, and display the behavior of dynamic systems. Recent decades have seen increasing recognition of the importance of understanding the behavior of dynamic systems---how systems of many interacting elements change and evolve over time and how global phenomena can arise from local interactions of these elements. New research projects on chaos, self-organization, adaptive systems, nonlinear dynamics, and artificial life are all part of this growing interest in system dynamics. The interest has spread from the scientific community to popular culture, with the publication of general-interest books about research into dynamic systems (Gleick 1987; Waldrop, 1992; GellMann, 1994; Kelly, 1994; Roetzheim, 1994; Holland, 1995; Kauffman, 1995).