This is our view of the atmosphere, magnified millions upon millions of times. We have tried to make our atmospheric simulator to scale. The canvas is approximately 37.5 nanometers wide, and each grid is one nanometer. We use an average atom size of .3 nanometers. We have calculated that this slice of atmosphere would contain roughly 35 molecules of air.
The simulation is actually slowed down by roughly 500,000,000,000 times. In our atmosphere, molecules at room temperature are moving at several hundred miles per hour. It only seems like the air is still because each molecule travels in a different direction, and the net effect of the movements of all them is to go essentially nowhere.
Our atom size was based on Googling for the size of an atom in nanometers. We found figures from .1nm to .3nm and chose the larger size, as .1nm is given for hydrogen. Our molecular size was obtained from an Air Products note comparing N2 versus O2 sizes as it pertained to sliding through a polymer. This was close enough for this go around.
To determine the number of atoms to place on screen, we applied the ideal gas law, PV=nRT. The trick in the application of any law is to get the units right, and leaving nothing to chance, we turned to this Ideal Gas Calculator. For 1 atmosphere at 75 degrees farenheight, we obtained 0.0000410292218718369 molars per cubic centimeter. We multiply that by Avogadro's number to get the number of molecules, and it is a genuinely large amount. However, we are interested in atoms per nanometer, and to get that, we divide by 10E21. That gave us a little less than 0.025 molecules per nanometer.
After that we arbitrarily say that we want each molecule of air to be 4 pixels wide. Having made that decision, and having 500 pixels to play with, we arrive at about 35 molecules per screen.
We distribute each pixel based on a percentage of presence in air. We obtain our percentages from Wikipedia: Composition of atmosphere. Nitrogen, the most common component of air, is 78.084%, Oxygen is 20.946%, Argon is .934% and the much discussed CO2 is 0.0383%. Distributed among our 35 molecules, we get 27 Nitrogen, 7 Oxygen, 1 Argon, and Carbon Dioxide doesn't get allocated at all. Indeed, to even see 1 carbon dioxide atom, we would have to have to zoom out considerably. Maybe in a future release.
Coloring is interesting. Nitrogen, as far as we can understand wikipedia, is in the ultraviolet range. So we call it purple even though to our eyes it is colorless. Oxygen is blueish because it absorbs red light. Argon is also blueish, but we made it more teal. Truth be told, there's no real thing as the native color of something. Various atoms emit different spectra depending upon how they are excited. It would take the incorporation of photons for us to really get a more accurate color, and incidentally study close in the effect of how light "warms" the atmosphere.
If we are incorrect in any of our calculations, please let us know.
We would like to forces. Atoms and molecules do not just glide past each other, they attract or repel each other based on four fundamental forces of nature. We would like to add energy as well. We would like to be able to alter the frequency of a beam of light onto our tiny piece of atmosphere and watch some of them get excited, and ultimately release their own photons, each in turn colliding with other atoms. This is interesting to us because only certain frequencies of photons actually interact with specific atoms.