Hello, this is a special bonus edition of the naked scientists in which Adam Murphy sets out to learn more about the world of modeling.

Not in the Naomi Campbell sense, but instead how researchers use computer simulations to gain an understanding

of the world and make predictions about the future, such as the spread of diseases, whether

a rocket will make it into orbit, and even whether it's going to rain tomorrow.

From looking at galaxies to the tiniest of subatomic particles,

computer models are pivotal in making science tick. They model how

traffic moves in a city and they predict weather patterns. Or at least they try to. But what are computer models good for?

And how do they work?

I'm Adam Murphy and I'll be finding out.

First up, what exactly is a computer model?

I spoke to Dominic Orchard from the University of Kent to find out.

In science, when we're trying to understand our world, we often come up with models,

their ways of explaining and representing our world that hide some of the inessential details.

So we might be trying to understand gravity and we might come up with a model of how a ball drops

to the ground and it doesn't matter about its color or the wind speed or

who's dropping the ball at size we just forget some of the inessential details and

focus on maybe the speed of it and how it bounces and how long it takes and so on.

So modeling is in general is about coming up with a way of understanding the world and

having a theory that captures the essential details of what we're studying.

So how do you make one?

What are the steps involved from going from a scientific idea to a computer model?

So you might start off with doing some mathematics. You might have a rough idea of the

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