Instrument · cinematic illustration
The Cosmos
The whole history of the universe, in a single canvas you can fly through.
Press play and fall through time — from the singularity, through inflation and the roiling quark–gluon plasma, past nucleosynthesis and the first light of the cosmic microwave background, into the dark ages, the ignition of the first stars, and out into the cosmic web of galaxies we live in. Up to two million glowing particles, integrated live on your GPU, billowing through curl-noise vapour and blooming under a real light-bleed pass. Drag to orbit, scroll to zoom, scrub the timeline to any epoch. This is the art shelf of the collider: an honest, evocative illustration of the real ΛCDM epoch sequence — not to scale, and not a physics result. Consistency, not proof; and here, plainly, wonder.
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The Singularity
t = 0Drag on the sky to orbit · scroll / pinch to zoom · space = play/pause · m = sound · f = fullscreen (Esc to exit) · scrub the timeline or tap an epoch name. ♪ Sound synthesizes a live score from the particle state; ● Record captures the animation with its audio track.
Read this before you screenshot it
This is art, and it says so. It is a stylized, illustrative journey through the sequence of epochs in the standard ΛCDM cosmology — inflation, the quark–gluon plasma, nucleosynthesis, recombination and the CMB, structure formation and the cosmic web. The particles are driven by evocative motion rules — a radial inflationary burst, a curl-noise flow field for the plasma and nebula vapour, and an attraction toward a precomputed cosmic-web scaffold for structure formation — chosen so the feel of each era reads at a glance. It is not to scale (no era's real size, duration, or particle number is honoured), it is not a numerical cosmology solve (no Friedmann integration, no Boltzmann code, no N-body gravity between these particles), and it is not a physics result. The colours, the timing, and the drama are artistic choices.
The real physics on this site lives next door and is gated: the parameter-free a₀ derivation against 175 SPARC galaxies, the particle-scale predictions against CODATA, and the live MOND-vs-Newton galaxy sandbox. Those make falsifiable claims. This page makes none. Its only job is to make the true order of cosmic history feel as astonishing as it actually is. Consistency, not proof.
The seven epochs you're travelling through
- 1 · The singularity (t = 0). A single blinding, blooming point — everything, nowhere yet.
- 2 · Inflation (t ≈ 10⁻³⁶ s). Space itself stretches exponentially; the point erupts outward in a searing blue-violet burst.
- 3 · Quark–gluon plasma (t ≈ 10⁻⁶ s). A churning vapour of hot matter — reds, oranges, magenta — billowing along a curl-noise flow field. The "smoke" money shot.
- 4 · Nucleosynthesis & cooling (t ≈ 3 min). The soup cools; the palette bleeds from white-hot through orange to deep-red embers as the first nuclei form.
- 5 · Recombination — first light (t ≈ 380,000 yr). The fog clears, the universe goes transparent, and the CMB is released: a flash that settles into a faint speckled temperature-fluctuation glow.
- 6 · Dark ages & first stars (t ≈ 100–400 Myr). Gravity takes over; matter streams onto a filamentary scaffold and points ignite into the first white-gold stars.
- 7 · The cosmic web (t ≈ 13.8 Gyr). The mature universe — glowing galaxy-nodes strung along filaments, nebula vapour draped between them, endlessly orbitable.