atomic Devlog #5: breaking physics on purpose, then adding real atoms
Two big landings since last time: the What-If labs (altered constants, custom force laws, classical ghosts) and screened multi-electron atoms all the way from engine to UI. 359 tests green.
You can now break the laws of physics
Five sliders over the raw constants of nature — double the electron charge, quadruple vacuum permittivity, watch alpha, the Bohr radius and binding energy refuse to move. That degeneracy is the whole lesson: only dimensionless combinations are observable. Next to it, force-law presets (power law, Yukawa, harmonic, finite well, Coulomb-plus-core) plus a type-your-own V(r) box with a whitelist parser and a trust gate that flags unconverged levels instead of silently serving them. And the classical ghost: what Newton predicts for hydrogen, a spiral into the nucleus in picoseconds, which quantum mechanics forbids. That refusal is the point.
Real multi-electron atoms
GSZ screened model with honest transcribed parameters for 15 elements, self-consistent-solver-free but validated against ionization data. Monte-Carlo cloud sampling with KS-tested distributions, y=0 plane cross-sections, screened levels and radial endpoints on the API, atom picker entries and an occupancy ladder in the UI. Sulfur and chlorine get a named refusal instead of invented numbers — no fitted parameters exist for them, so the server says exactly that.