BUTTERFLY · FX

Universe Loom

Deterministic cosmogenesis instrument
ART / MODEL

Choose a Mandelbrot escape map or Buddhabrot orbit-density map for the source pane. Drag on the source pane to create a universe. Scroll over it to magnify complex parameter space. Scroll over the universe pane to magnify its structure, and drag there to roam. Press plus or minus to change universe magnification, zero to frame the full universe, and T to toggle Spacetime Flow.

MANDELBROT / SOURCE C-SPACE · READY
UNIVERSE / CONSEQUENCE NO COSMOS YET
01
DRAW THROUGH THE EDGE Sample instability → bend an attractor → grow a cosmos.
INSTRUMENT MANUAL / REALITY CHECK

THE LONG CAUSAL BRIDGE

GENERATIVE COSMOLOGY, NOT A PHYSICAL THEORY.

The app joins real mathematical ideas through an invented mapping. A Mandelbrot pixel is a parameter, not a place in space; the attractor is a signal generator, not a force; the glowing “bubbles” are density contours, not literal dark-matter objects.

MATHEMATICALLY MEASURED

01. A line becomes a fractal spectrum

Both source views ordinarily evaluate zₙ₊₁ = zₙ² + c. Mandelbrot colors each starting value c by its escape behavior. Buddhabrot instead accumulates the paths of many escaping orbits into a progressive traffic-density image. It is another view of the same iteration, not a different fractal.

Spacetime Flow gives the parameter plane a cyclic conformal coordinate: Cτ(c) = c / (1 + λ(τ)c), then evaluates zₙ₊₁ = zₙ² + Cτ(c), where λ(τ) = A·e^(i2πτ/32) and the small affine amplitude A increases linearly with the active universe’s measured spin signal. Each frame is a smooth Möbius reparameterization Cτ⁻¹(M) of the classical Mandelbrot set—not a claim that the set physically moves. Switching flow off eases A back to zero. Buddhabrot and genome sampling remain canonical z² + c.

The pixel meanings differ: a Mandelbrot location is the parameter c, while a Buddhabrot location is somewhere an escaping z orbit visited. The drawing overlay deliberately reuses that numbered complex grid as c in both modes, so switching the microscope changes what guides your eye—not the genome rule.

Your line is resampled by arc length, so drawing speed does not change its genome. In either visual mode, the engine reads the drawn complex coordinates and records smooth escape time, interior occupancy, orbit-trap distance, boundary crossings, and signal roughness.

The boundary contains structure at every visible scale. Sampling across it produces abrupt changes from one nearby parameter to the next. That is parameter sensitivity—not, by itself, the atmospheric “butterfly effect.”

CONTROLLED EXPERIMENT

02. A′ differs by ε

Butterfly Twin offsets one resampled complex coordinate by ε = 10⁻⁸. Both branches obey identical code. Their strange-attractor trajectories and phase fields then separate. The displayed score is a visual divergence measure, not a claimed Lyapunov exponent.

GENERATIVE MAPPING

03. The actual chaos layer

The fractal genome selects a Lorenz, Rössler, or Clifford regime. These systems are deterministic and bounded, yet can trace non-repeating structure that is highly sensitive to initial conditions. The animated transfer loom is a projection of that trajectory.

LORENZ
dx/dt = σ(y − x)
dy/dt = x(ρ − z) − y
dz/dt = xy − βz
PHYSICS-INSPIRED ANALOGY

04. Correlated phase voices

The attractor supplies deterministic phases for a multi-scale procedural density field. In a Butterfly Twin, the Phase Link dial preserves some large-scale modes while allowing small-scale structure to differ. The retained similarity is classical phase correlation—an “entanglement” metaphor, never quantum entanglement.

During Spacetime Flow, one pauseable 32-second phase applies a bounded, periodic displacement to the field and to every galaxy proxy. The field-scale twist increases linearly with the genome’s spin channel; each galaxy adds a deterministic local epicycle and disk rotation derived from the same seed. This keeps motion coherent and replayable without pretending to integrate gravity.

This is where multiple lines become interesting: a woven bundle contributes several phase voices, so its large forms emerge from interference rather than from one seed alone.

PHYSICS-INSPIRED ANALOGY

05. Invisible scaffolding becomes visible

The shader grows a CDM-shaped toy field from broad basins into sheets, filaments, and knots. Cool blue structure represents dark-matter-like density. Violet bubble rims are nested iso-density and potential contours—an interface for seeing a continuous field, not a proposal that dark matter is made of bubbles.

At galaxy scale, thin cyan ellipses are toy total-mass potential contours. They are deliberately drawn behind amber, white, and young blue luminous matter: stars and gas make the visible ring, while a more extended invisible potential influences what orbits can persist. Polar rings are especially interesting because motion in two nearly perpendicular planes can constrain a halo’s three-dimensional shape.

Real cold dark matter evolves in three dimensions under gravity and cosmic expansion. This instrument uses a fast 2D procedural displacement and schematic halo proxies that borrow the visual logic of gravitational collapse; they are not mass reconstructions.

EMERGENT OUTPUT

06. Nothing places a galaxy by hand

Galaxy proxies are sampled from the attractor-warped density knots. Age, density, cooling, turbulence, spin, and feedback determine which halos light up, when they are born, and whether they read as dwarfs, ellipticals, or spirals. The hierarchy is emergent inside this model: field → filament → halo → light.

The violet → cyan → amber → white scale is an order or “negentropy” proxy: it tracks coherent, collapsed organization relative to the initial procedural field. It is not negative thermodynamic entropy; the simulated system has no complete heat or information accounting.

Annular systems use several visibly different channels. Collisional rings behave like outward density waves after an impact; resonance rings collect around bar-driven orbit families; polar rings rotate in a strongly tilted plane; Hoag-like rings separate an old core from a young outer annulus; unresolved annuli deliberately keep competing histories alive.

Formation Tension ranks galaxy proxies whose mass, birth time, ring support, halo alignment, spiral order, turbulence, spin, or thermal state fit this toy field unusually poorly. A high magenta score means “the visible evidence does not select a clean history here,” not “a galaxy like this cannot exist.” It is an internal consistency diagnostic, not an astronomical probability.

Real galaxies additionally require gas hydrodynamics, radiative cooling, star formation, black holes, mergers, chemistry, and feedback across immense ranges of scale. Here they are luminous summaries of collapsed regions. Their Spacetime Flow paths are analytic visual advection—not calculated trajectories or an N-body solution.

BOUNDARY OF THE CLAIM

07. What the app can honestly teach

Simple deterministic rules can create multiscale structure. Nearby initial conditions can diverge. Hidden fields can organize visible matter. Macroscopic form can emerge without a designer placing every part. Those are real shared ideas.

The app does not demonstrate that the Mandelbrot set caused cosmology, that dark matter is chaotic, that universes are quantum-entangled, that Spacetime Flow is motion through a physical fourth dimension, or that this is a precision N-body simulation. A material ring galaxy is also different from an Einstein ring, which is a lensed image of a more distant source. This is an instrument for intuition and art.

It is deterministic, but it is not cryptography and it is not reversible. Arc-length resampling, summary statistics, finite escape measurements, a non-cryptographic hash, clamping, and image tone mapping all discard information. A bottled genome can replay its stored strand; a rendered universe cannot uniquely reveal the line that produced it.

LIGHT PATH

Field Optics

READING THE LIGHT PATH

The instrument is tracing how this universe becomes light.

FIVE MOVES

HOW TO GROW A UNIVERSE

  1. 01
    CHOOSE A SOURCE MICROSCOPE

    Mandelbrot maps which starts escape; Buddhabrot progressively maps where escaped trajectories travel. They share a numbered complex grid, though their pixels mean different things.

  2. 02
    DRAW THROUGH IT

    Drag a line across the boundary. Branch mode ignites on release; Weave mode lets several strands interfere.

  3. 03
    LET STRUCTURE EMERGE

    Play model time. Watch density collect into contours, filaments, halo knots, and luminous galaxies.

  4. 04
    LET IT FLOW THROUGH TIME

    By default, each new universe eases into Spacetime Flow automatically. Use the model-time ribbon or press T to pause and resume the shared mathematical phase that reshapes the source family while the field, galaxies, rings, and satellites move together; your pause remains in place for later births.

  5. 05
    DIVE INTO THE CONSEQUENCE

    Scroll or double-click over the universe, then drag to roam. Deeper scales resolve galaxy arms, luminous rings, stellar knots, cyan potential contours, and magenta formation-tension flags.

D drawH panP probeB butterfly twinN new genomeSPACE emergenceT spacetime flow+ universe dive universe retreat0 frame universe
OPEN-SOURCE CREDITS

BUILT IN THE OPEN

Butterfly FX — Universe Loom is released under the MIT License. You may use, study, modify, and redistribute the project under those terms.

p5.js is copied unmodified into the offline/Pages build. Full notices and license texts ship with the source repository and desktop bundle. None of these projects endorse this simulation.

AUTOGEN / DISPLAY MODE

LET THE LOOM DREAM

The instrument will draw new deterministic genomes, evolve their universes, and continue until you press Escape. Spacetime Flow stays engaged throughout Autogen, then returns to your prior paused or moving choice. Every generated branch remains in the archive. About every five seconds, it favors an unusual ring or high-tension galaxy before reframing. In BOTH mode the two cameras move together: the left revisits a coordinate that fed the genome while the right dives into one consequence of that recipe. Mandelbrot is the default and its tour favors intricate boundary points; Buddhabrot is used only when you choose it.

FULLSCREEN COMPOSITION
Fullscreen uses the active WebGL renderer. Safe Preview remains available when hardware acceleration is unavailable.