Computer Labs for Macintosh

(SSS stands for for SolidState Simulations, developed by Silsbee and company for teaching solid state physics. You can download the entire SSS distribution for Mac OS (except that the presets and documentation for ising will be different): unpack as described below. Source code is also available.)

• For recent machines,
  • Download sssSethnaMac.tgz (3.4MB compressed),
  • Move it into a folder you'd like to store the programs in, and
  • Type "tar -xvzf sssSethnaMac.tgz" in a command window. (If your browser automagically transforms the file into sssSethnaMac.tar, try "tar -xvf sssSethnaMac.tar".)
• For the older PowerPC architecture, download this: sss.sit (3.6MB compressed).
  • If you get a screenful of gibberish, hit Back and try holding down alt/option with the mouseclick: it should then ask you where to save the file on your disk).
  • It may unpack automatically. You may have to drop sss.sit onto "Stuffit Expander".
  • Where it ends up and/or unpacks to depends on how you're set up: we've found the sss folder sometimes on our desktop and sometimes in a netscape downloads folder.
  • If you already downloaded our sss directory, you may want to change the old folder name before unstuffing the new one: one of our Macs will rename the new directory sss.1 (and our program doesn't work until the name is changed back to sss).

Go into the new sss folder, go into bin, and execute galileo (or pythag, or schrdgr ...), either by clicking on it in the Finder, or typing "./galileo" into a command window (the default path often does not include the current directory). You can't move the executables without moving the whole sss directory folder. If you have any problems, let me know.

James P. Sethna

Statistical Mechanics: Entropy, Order Parameters, and Complexity, now available at Oxford University Press (USA, Europe).