Instrument note
What the readings mean
The lab visualizes heuristic summaries of particle motion. Useful for intuition, not ground truth physics.
Entropy-like spread
Speeds across bodies are histogrammed into bins; dispersion in that histogram is treated as uncertainty in the motion pattern. Higher values usually mean irregular or broad velocity structure.
Prediction error
Earlier frames are reused to extrapolate particle positions briefly forward. Larger mismatch between predicted and realized positions lowers confidence and raises horizon collapse style signals. This is a proxy for short-term instability.
Compressibility
Combines dispersion, entropy proxy, spatial spread, and recent prediction error into a scalar that trends up when motions look orderly enough to summarize. When it is low, the visualization down-ranks invariant language.
Chaos and horizon collapse
Horizon collapse rises when prediction error and divergence grow, indicating trajectories are becoming sensitive to small perturbations. In this state, stable symbolic summaries are harder to maintain.
Causal edges on screen
Lines join nearby particles with strength falling off by distance. They illustrate coupling density, not experimental causality.
Law discovery
When compressibility is high and entropy is moderate, the system surfaces short symbolic candidates with a confidence estimate. These are heuristics meant to support visual storytelling.
Controls
- Gravity coupling scales pairwise attraction alongside regime specific biases.
- Entropy bath injects stochastic kick into velocities each tick.
- Force injection nudges all bodies from the click vector; singularities attract strongly.