Technique · Fields
Plasma and lightning
Wandering, forking strands of light, white-hot at the core: a plasma globe or a bolt between two poles.
Plasma and lightning is a field drawn for every pixel by the graphics chip. Every piece on Synapse Drip is made from a recipe that layers techniques like this one, and you can change any of it in the Studio.
Good to know
- A plasma is a gas in which electrons have been stripped from their atoms; it is the fourth state of matter, and it makes up most of the visible matter in the universe.
- In a plasma globe a noble gas at low pressure sits around a high-frequency electrode; the filaments are glowing discharge that reaches for the glass, which your hand touches.
- St Elmo's fire is a faint plasma discharge from pointed things in the strong electric field of a storm.
- Hotter sources shine bluer: stars run from red dwarfs to blue giants, and the cooling here goes from white-hot at the core to blue in the halo.
- Lightning heats the air in its channel to around 30,000 kelvin, several times hotter than the surface of the Sun.
- Branching electrical discharges follow nearly the same mathematics as diffusion-limited aggregation: the tips carry the strongest field and so keep growing.
The mathematics
- Each strand is bent by four octaves of noise, so the curve is jagged at every scale, as a real discharge is.
- Niemeyer, Pietronero and Wiesmann modelled branching sparks in 1984 as a random growth biased toward the electric field: the dielectric breakdown model.
- 7 strands, each a different noise curve, share one set of rules; only their seeds differ.
In art
- At the Chicago exposition of 1893 Nikola Tesla lit gas-filled tubes without wires, and the crowds took it for magic.
- The Futurists tried to paint energy and motion themselves rather than the things that move.
More ways to use it
Related techniques
Nebula and stars · Liquid · Droplets · Network · Terrain and maps · Neuron · Order to chaos · Fractal tree