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What is physica?
physica is the name of a computer program that you will be using
in many of your courses in Physics. It is difficult to find a
successful physicist these days who does not use a computer in one way
or another. The computer has become an indispensable tool: to be
successful in many fields of human endeavor today not only you need to
know the field, you also need to know how to apply computer tools to it
efficiently. Physics is no exception, and physica is one such
tool. You will have to spend some time learning how to use it but in
the long run it will save you time and effort, and you will become more
efficient in doing your assignments and lab reports.
In previous versions physica used to be known as plotdata. You may find
some older versions of documents that refer to the program in this way.
As the old name implies, physica excels at plotting data.
We will get to a simple example in a moment, when you will
analyze the results of some measurement and generate a figure for a
report or publication. However, physica is versatile enough to be used
in other contexts as well, such as when you want to plot an analytical
expression, or prepare a transparency or a poster with large-size text
or mathematical formulas. In addition, physica has its own macro
language, a way of grouping commands into
``programs'' and then executing (running) those programs with a single
physica command. The syntax of this language is similar to
Fortran, and is quite straightforward.
physica is one of several programs originally developed at
TRIUMF
(an accelerator facility in Vancouver, BC). Versions of physica
exist for Linux, Windows and Mac OS, and a GUI version of physica,
called extrema
also exists, for those who prefer it to a full command-line interface.
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