2^28 balls constrained by gravity and a W @animations

Uploaded May 2026 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago

Further elaboration on huge numbers of balls falling under gravitational influence on piecewise functions; here a W-like function. This is a chaotic system (that is, no moose drop here!) revealing some pronounced caustics by the approximately quarter of a billion (2^28) particles. Rendering time was approximately six hours on a MB PRO M3 MAX 64 GB.

Music by @gpcbass . The song is called Nocturne, which is an Evert Taube cover. Link: youtube.com/watch?v=4mPqBl_tyv0

Visuals in Python and FFmpeg

2^28 balls constrained by gravity and a W

$Fractal emerging from chaos in a circle Shown is a ball bouncing in a circle under gravity for many start positions. The sixth bounce is associated with a color of the circle for colouring a pixel representing the start position. For a relatively high pixel density, the resulting image becomes a fractal. In the very end, a corresponding image for 10 bounces is shown, indicating, unsurprisingly, a more chaotic behaviour. Music by @gpcbass! The song is called Cayenne.$

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