Physics

Plasma

Magnetohydrodynamics. Two dimensions. Zero shortcuts.

A 128×128 ideal-MHD solver, running continuously. Orszag-Tang initial conditions on a 2π periodic domain. It drives the public entropy beacon — and its conservation numbers are not asserted in copy, they are read off the signed frame header below, where you can check the signature yourself.

Grid 128 × 128

Lax-Friedrichs · Δm/m and ΔE/E measured from signed frame headers

Solver

What the kernel does.

Ideal MHD in conservation form. 6 field components per cell (ρ, vx, vy, p, Bx, By). Lax-Friedrichs fluxes on a 128² periodic grid. First-order in space — diffusive at shocks, exact where it counts.

128²
Grid cells
6
Fields per cell
~2 s
Beacon cadence
v5.2.0
Rail runtime
Validation

Orszag-Tang vortex.

The canonical 2D MHD test. Smooth initial conditions evolve into turbulent small-scale structure with sharp shock fronts. Mass and energy drift are measured against their step-zero anchors every step and shipped in each frame's header — the readouts on the viewport are parsed from those bytes in your browser, never typed by us.

Orszag-Tang checking…
Grid 128×128 Step Δm/m ΔE/E

Density (ρ) sampled from /entropy/frame/current — the solver grid, min-max normalized and color-mapped in your GPU. A new keyframe lands about every ~2 s; the display cross-dissolves between keyframes — a video fade, not fabricated physics. Exactly what is signed: an independent witness publishes an Ed25519 signature over the SHA-256 of the latest frame at /entropy/frame/latest.attestation.json, refreshed about twice a minute. The ⌁ buttons re-fetch the frame, re-derive its hash in your browser, and check that signature — if the frame has rotated past the signed one, the proof says so instead of pretending.

Why plasma

Because physics should be cheap to verify.

Plasma is chaotic. Small perturbations blow up fast. That makes it a good random-source — the output of a correctly-running MHD step is unpredictable even to us, which is the property we need for an honest entropy beacon. And it's beautiful to look at.

There's a serious version of this argument involving fusion reactor control, but we'll let the beacon make the case.