idea space - a cyclic universe

stills of an ongoing visualization project of a space with a steadily increasing number of moving particles attracted by slowly moving, invisible gravitational centres. the cyclic nature of the space itself acts as four dimensional history, causing each particle to leave a persistent trace in time as well as in space. the paradoxical result of this setup is that whereas the number of particles is approaching infinity there's no increase in computational cost.

as the particles move through space they become attracted by the various, initially randomly positioned gravitational centres. the force of attraction follows the classic "inverse square law" in physics, meaning a particle is a lot more influenced and accelerated by a close attractor than by ones further away. the more particles are in a highly active gravitational reqion of the space, the more clearly lines start to appear, showing the trajectory of these particles through space as well as time towards the locally strongest gravitational center.

materials

• timelapse animationin MP4 format (16 sec, ~5MB)
• the images below are taken between 13000 and 24000 iterations.

© karsten schmidt, 2004 - last update: 24/10/04