01N-body gravity
Orbital Mechanics
Six worlds around a quiet sun. Your cursor is a small mass — lean on their orbits and watch them precess.
Each card is a running simulation, not an illustration. Hover to apply a real force — a gravity well, a damped hand, a source of heat. Everything dims when you look away. Ordered from the familiar to the strange: the sky first, then the quantum, then the Earth.
The large-scale machinery: inverse-square forces, tides, accretion, and light bent by mass.
Six worlds around a quiet sun. Your cursor is a small mass — lean on their orbits and watch them precess.
A comet sweeps the same area in the same time — sluggish at aphelion, urgent at perihelion, tail always blown away from the sun.
A rubble moon held together by its own gravity. Pull it too close and the planet's tides unmake it into a ring.
Matter spirals toward a compact star, inner orbits outrunning the outer. Stir it and a spiral wave rings through the disk.
A world crosses its star and the light dips by a percent. Astronomers find planets in that dip.
Keep your cursor here. A sun swells into a red giant, tears itself apart, and condenses into a black hole that still bends your hand.
A mass you cannot see bends the light of galaxies behind it into arcs and rings. Your cursor carries the lens.
Mass dents the lattice; a coasting particle follows the dent. Move your own mass through the sheet and it rings.
Pendulums, vibrations, and the magnetic field — the physics of the human scale, made visible.
Fifteen pendulums, fifteen different periods. Patterns assemble and dissolve out of nothing but timing.
Two identical double pendulums released a tenth of a degree apart. Give it twenty seconds.
Two pendulums on a shared bar trade their energy back and forth, endlessly. Touch one and the trade goes on without it.
Sand on a vibrating plate flees the motion and gathers on the still lines. Move your cursor to change the note.
Iron filings in oil align with the magnetic field. Bring your own magnet near and the pattern re-decides itself.
Where randomness becomes predictability — and where time gets its direction.
A pollen grain kicked by molecules too small to see. Einstein used this very motion to prove atoms exist.
Two gases mix. Stir them all you like — they will never unmix. This is the arrow of time.
From the first hints of the nucleus to measurement itself — each card is a real experiment.
A stream of alpha particles through gold foil. Nearly all pass through. The rare one that bounces back discovered the nucleus.
Light frees electrons from metal — but only if each photon carries enough. Tune the color upward and, suddenly: emission.
Particles land one by one and build an interference pattern — until you watch which slit they take. Then the pattern dies.
A wave packet meets a wall it cannot climb — and a small piece of it appears on the far side anyway.
No orbit, only probability. Dot by dot, the shape of a hydrogen atom's electron emerges. Linger to excite it.
Beginning with the molten young Earth: the slow forces that built a planet and still shake it.
The young Earth is molten. Iron rains toward the center, rock rises, and a core begins to glow.
Rock creeps in vast slow cells, dragging the plates above it. Warm the mantle and a plume rises beneath your hand.
A locked fault lets the landscape bend for decades — then takes it all back in seconds.
Grain by grain, the sea floor writes its own history — coarse layers for storms, fine for calm.
Two kinds of waves leave an earthquake — one fast, one slow — and the liquid core casts a shadow that proves it is there.