Attractors

Splashery stretches a drumhead over this Splash's outline, twelve inches across, and finds the ways it can ring. Its lowest is 847.7 Hz, 65 cents flat of A5, the nearest tine on the comb. The next fifteen are its overtones, and each one draws its own figure: sand gathers on the lines that stay still.

Tap it to race a spark round. Hands-on: drag the point to a new start; let go.

In 1963 the scientist Edward Lorenz made a very simple model of moving air: three short equations. He found that its path loops around two centers forever, never repeating and never crossing itself, in a shape like a pair of butterfly wings. This shape is called the Lorenz attractor.

Tap it and a bright spark races along the whole path, drawing it again in light that then fades. Two starting points that are almost the same soon follow very different paths. This is called chaos, or the butterfly effect, and it is why weather is so hard to forecast far ahead.

Made in Splashery. Its code is MIT.

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