Technique · Fields
Wave packets
Translucent rainbow wave packets with elliptical orbits, travelling beads, a spiral of dots and warm bokeh on black.
Wave packets 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
- The Heisenberg uncertainty principle, found in 1927, says that a wave packet narrow in position must be broad in wavelength: the more exactly you know where a particle is, the less you can know about its momentum.
- Electrons fired one at a time through a pair of slits still build up an interference pattern of bands: each electron behaves as a wave that goes through both.
- The light from glowing hydrogen comes in a few narrow lines at exact wavelengths, which was the clue that the energies inside an atom come in steps.
- A wave packet is how quantum mechanics describes a particle that has a position as well as a wavelength: add waves of slightly different wavelength and they cancel everywhere except in one small region.
- Louis de Broglie suggested in 1924 that every particle has a wavelength, and electron diffraction experiments in 1927 confirmed it.
The mathematics
- Each packet is A exp(-(x - c)^2 / 2 s^2) sin(kx + phase): a Gaussian envelope times a sine, and 8 of them are added; where two overlap the colours add, like two lights.
- The Fourier transform of a Gaussian is a Gaussian: a narrow packet in space is a wide one in wavelength, which is where the uncertainty principle comes from.
- An orbit is an ellipse (x / a)^2 + (y / b)^2 = 1 turned through an angle; a bead moves round it at angle psi = rate times time, so it speeds up and slows down only as the ellipse is squashed.
In art
- Music and light have long been drawn as waves: Wassily Kandinsky and the Synchromists of the 1910s tried to paint pictures that, like music, had rhythm and no subject.
- Ben Laposky began photographing the traces of electronic waves on an oscilloscope screen around 1950 and called the results oscillons, an early kind of electronic abstract art.
More ways to use it
Related techniques
Nebula and stars · Liquid · Droplets · Network · Terrain and maps · Neuron · Order to chaos · Fractal tree