Wave 105 — 29 New Simulations in Condensed Matter, Quantum, Materials & Generative Art
This is the biggest single drop since Wave 103: twenty-nine new Canvas 2D simulations, all interactive, all running smoothly in your browser with no plugins and nothing to install.
We have been quiet for a couple of weeks, and now you know why. Wave 105 is enormous — 29 brand-new simulations in a single release, our largest haul since Wave 103. Every one is a fresh Canvas 2D build: lightweight, responsive, and tuned to run at a comfortable frame rate on a laptop or a phone. We have grouped the highlights below, but the only real way to appreciate them is to open one and start dragging sliders. Let us take you on a quick tour.
🧲 Condensed matter — five deep cuts
Condensed matter physics is where quantum mechanics meets the messy, collective behaviour of real materials, and it is genuinely thrilling to watch emergent order appear out of nothing. Start with the phase transition (Ising model), where a grid of spins flips between disordered chaos and magnetised order as you nudge the temperature through the critical point. Then chill things right down with the Bose-Einstein condensate, in which thousands of atoms collapse into a single quantum state and behave as one. The Josephson junction shows supercurrent tunnelling between two superconductors with no voltage at all — one of the most counter-intuitive effects in all of physics. For frustration and disorder, the spin glass traps the system in a rugged energy landscape with no clean ground state, while the topological insulator conducts perfectly around its edges while staying stubbornly insulating inside. Five sims, five reasons this field keeps winning Nobel Prizes.
🎨 Mathematics & generative art — patterns that never repeat
Some of the most beautiful things in mathematics are also the most visual, and this batch leans hard into that. The Penrose tiling covers the plane with two rhombi in a pattern that has five-fold symmetry yet never, ever repeats — a impossibility that turned out to describe real quasicrystals. The Apollonius gasket packs circles inside circles inside circles in an infinitely self-similar fractal. Our spirograph brings back the childhood toy with mathematically exact cardioids and hypotrochoids, and the continued fractions simulation reveals why the golden ratio is, in a precise sense, the most irrational number of all. Leave any of these running and you have an accidental screensaver.
🪐 Space — the dance of orbits
Two new gravitational classics arrive together. The restricted three-body problem traces a small body weaving through the combined pull of two large masses — the chaotic system that defeated Poincaré and seeded modern chaos theory. Sitting right alongside it, the Lagrange points simulation maps the five gravitational sweet spots where a spacecraft can hover almost for free, the very places we park telescopes like the JWST.
🌐 Complexity & networks — order on the edge
If you love the idea of simple rules producing astonishing structure, this section is for you. The Abelian sandpile drops grains one at a time and topples them into self-organised fractal avalanches — a textbook case of self-organised criticality. The percolation sim shows the razor edge at which scattered connections suddenly merge into one spanning cluster, the same maths behind everything from porous rock to epidemics. And the random graph demonstrates the famous giant-component phase transition the instant you cross one edge per node.
🔊 Sound — illusions for your ears
We could not resist two audio-flavoured pieces. The Shepard tone creates the auditory equivalent of an endless staircase — a pitch that appears to rise forever without ever getting higher. And spectral music visualises how composers such as Grisey built entire works out of the overtone series itself, turning the physics of timbre into art.
With this wave landing, the library now exceeds 880 simulations — a milestone that felt impossibly far away when we started. Whether you are a student, a teacher hunting for a vivid demo, or simply someone who likes poking at beautiful systems, there has never been more to explore. Pick a section above, click through, and let the sliders pull you down the rabbit hole. We will see you for Wave 106.