This software in intended to be used to accompany the text written by Edwin F. Taylor, John A. Wheeler, and Edmund Bertschinger, Exploring Black Holes. This book is available online at no cost at www.eftaylor.com/exploringblackholes. The goal of this book is to offer a concise, directed examination of general relativity and black holes. Its goal was to provide tools that motivate students to become active participants in carrying out their own investigations about curved spacetime near Earth and black holes. To that end, the book used calculus and algebra, rather than tensors, to make general relativity accessible to second- and third-year students. The goal of this software is to provide an interactive visualization of the concepts presented in this book.
The General Relativity Orbits (GROrbits) Java applet was written by Slavomir Tuleja (Gymnázium arm. gen. L. Svobodu), Tomáš Ježo, and Jozef Hanč based on a cT program written by Adam Riess and Edwin F. Taylor. It was converted from Java to JavaScript by Wolfgang Christian (Davidson College) and Robert Hanson (St. Olaf College) using the SwingJS system developed at St. Olaf College.