Naturally Occurring Quasicrystals(johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com) |
Naturally Occurring Quasicrystals(johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com) |
The code was really interesting to read and tinker with! I made a version where the symmetry (7 originally) can be other numbers, and that was fascinating to see!
ShaderToy forever!!
It struck me as looking a bit like a demoscene plasma effect but with a radial/angular aspect! (also reminds me of cymatics diagrams a bit!)
I experimented with non-integer symmetries and it seemed not to introduce discontinuities, and I made it produce an RGB value for fun too:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35297608-the-second-kind...
It's a riveting account of years of research to discover Quasicrytals from theory, to experiments, to literally hunting in a meteor field in eastern Russia!
> researchers have identified a new material within trinitite called a clathrate—a cagelike chemical lattice that traps other atoms inside it.[0]
[0]https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/strange-crystals-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invertebrate_iridescent_virus_...
I don't have anything to say about quasicrystals, other than it seems right up this blog's alley, as the other most recent articles are about math and materials (like feldspars [0]).
[0] https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2501:_Average_Fam...
I doubled the angle so that it doesn't drift to the side any more.. and put it back to 7-symmetry, but left it with the coloring I added (now adjustable via consts):
https://www.shadertoy.com/view/7Xl3Ws
And a small tweak:
https://www.shadertoy.com/view/73lGDs
If you squint with it on fullscreen on that last one there's a wonderful mixture of things feeling like they are rotating vs flowing inward-and-outward from 'centers' (like it's ambiguous whether it's curl or divergence somehow for my eyes/brain at least!).
Hooray for sines and cosines and shaders and thanks for motivating me to play!