The paper traces the early stages of Berni Alder’s scientific accomplishments, focusing on his contributions to the development of Computational Methods for the study of Statistical Mechanics. Following attempts in the early 50s to implement Monte Carlo methods to study equilibrium properties of many-body systems, Alder developed in collaboration with Tom Wainwright the Molecular Dynamics approach as an alternative tool to Monte Carlo, allowing to extend simulation techniques to non-equilibrium properties. This led to the confirmation of the existence of a phase transition in a system of hard spheres in the late 50s, and was followed by the discovery of the unexpected long-time tail in the correlation function about a decade later. In the late 70s Alder was among the pioneers of the extension of Computer Simulation techniques to Quantum problems. Centered around Alder’s own pioneering contributions, the paper covers about thirty years of developments in Molecular Simulation, from the birth of the field to its coming of age as a self-sustained discipline.

中文翻译：

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伯尼·奥尔德（Berni Alder）和分子模拟的开创时代

本文追溯了伯尼·奥尔德（Berni Alder）的科学成就的早期阶段，着重介绍了他对统计力学研究计算方法发展的贡献。在50年代初期尝试实施蒙特卡洛方法以研究多体系统的平衡性质之后，奥尔德与汤姆·温赖特（Tom Wainwright）合作开发了分子动力学方法，作为蒙特卡洛的替代工具，从而允许将模拟技术扩展到非平衡性质。 。这导致人们在50年代后期确认了硬球系统中存在相变，并在大约十年后发现了相关函数中出乎意料的长时间拖尾。在70年代后期，Alder成为将计算机仿真技术扩展到量子问题的先驱之一。