Alder, Bemi

John Prausnitz I d like to make one quick addendum. I want to defend the use of molecular simulations because we have gained insight from them as well. Let me mention one outstanding example. Until about 20 years ago, we believed that you could only condense a phase with attractive forces, and no one ever questioned that myth. Then computer simulations were done in the 1960s by Bemi Alder and his associates. The results showed that even for hard spheres, without any attractive forces, you can get a phase transition. This was never present in the van der Waals theory. I want to emphasize that simulations also add to our conceptual knowledge. 

Giovanni Ciccotti received his Laurea in Physics in 1967 from the University of Roma La Sapienza . In 1971 he joined the Science Faculty of the University of Lecce, in 1973 that of Camerino and in 1977 moved back to the Science Faculty of the University of Roma La Sapienza , at hrst as Associate Professor and since 1990 as Professor of Structure of Matter . His activity in Molecular Dynamics started in Paris, while at CECAM (Centre Europeen de Calcul Atomique et Moleculaire) in 1974 and his hrst paper in MD was in 1975. In 1999 he won the Bemi J. Alder CECAM prize and from 2004 he is Eellow of lOP. His hrst publication, in 1969, was a theoretical paper on elementary particles. 

MD was developed by Bemi J. Alder and collaborators at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory the first paper authored by Alder and Wainwright appeared in 1957 [5]. Again consider a system of particles, each at a given time at a location specified, and with velocity (or momentum) also specified. In contrast to MC in which one particle moves at a time, here we let all particles run at once. The velocity v.(t) of the /th particle at time t can be for instance calculated as... 

Methods In Computational Physics," Statistical Physics, Vol. I, Bemi Alder et sd., Eds., Academic Press, NY (1963).. 

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