[ktpsns]

Here is why the "one physics simulation should cover it all" idea will never work: The word "physics" is just too broad. Is it about particle simulation (classical N-body simulations)? Or is it about fluid simulation (classical CFD = computational fluid dynamics, or classical Navier-stokes)? Is it about a game engine, digital art or just for a fancy GUI? What about the hardware, should we use GPGPUs, distributed computing or so?

Talking about the output, what is it the user is actually interested in? Some direct simulation outcome, such as trajectories or densities, still images, time series or some derived quantities? Is the user capable of programming in some language, is interface scripting even required? Does she actually prefer a CLI?

There are a lot of different industries with different needs. For certain engineering tasks (such as aviation), there are long standing tools which work fine and people are used to. For hobbyists or the gaming industry, the same applies.

Disclaimer: I am a theoretical/computational physicist. Maybe I am too much thinking about simulating heavy ion collisions or black hole mergers, but given the physical problem you want to solve, there are quite different numerical methods applied. This applies for fundamental concepts: Besides the traditional linear algebra/partial differential equation solving, there are statistical approaches and nowadays artificial intelligence for obtaining a solution to a problem in a shorter time. The ways how to model physical reality are as diverse as the physical problems.

[peterwoerner]

I mean yes, but also in mechanical engineering communities (and maybe others) we don't typical think of physics simulations in the way you do--it is well understood as a FEA tool which solves the shit we learned in undergraduate or a user provided weak form and nobody would confuse it with e.g. molecular dynamics, dft, particle dissipative dynamics.

Even though there are specialized tools, there is definitely a market for comsol like products. A problem here is they don't differentiate from comsol.

That being said, he/she/it/their would do a lot better focusing on a particular niche. For example thermal desktop is used for widely in the space industry for space simulations because it is the only off the shelf solver which does radiative heat transfer and controls well. But all the thermal analysts I know the UI is basically garbage and it solves their models way to slowly. They also have huge issues with their simulations taking for every so if you hammered on that problem for a while you would probably end up with a customer base.

[fsh]

Commercial multiphysics simulators such as COMSOL are widely used in engineering and experimental physics. Of course they cannot cover all possible use cases, but they are perfectly fine for the vast majority of simulations.

[regularfry]

How is "one physics simulation should cover it" relevant?

[ktpsns]

This was a meta post considering a couple of posts such as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24905261