Name: Anonymous 2016-03-13 18:22
General relativity is cool. Some of the ideas introduced there are conceptually so simple and beautiful that I can’t help but appreciate Einstein’s work.
When I saw Interstellar in 2014, I was especially amazed by the black hole, Gargantua, that they had rendered. There’s no doubt the artistic license was extensively used there, but still, they used the Kerr metric to describe a spinning black hole and even published a scientific paper about it.
Then, a few months later, rantonels’ excellent article and Python code appeared on Hacker News. He was rendering a Schwarzschild black hole by means of ray tracing, making clever use of NumPy for fast calculations. You should definitely check out the article and the code — they’re awesome and you’ll most likely learn a lot!
As a numerical physics enthusiast, I began wondering if I could render such images myself. By the time, however, I wasn’t skilled enough in general relativity to grasp the theoretical side. I then noticed there was going to be a general relativity course held at the university next year. I decided to wait until that.
The course began and the patient waiting paid off. Soon enough I noticed the simplicity of the core ideas like geodesics, which were necessary to do this kind of a simulation. I immediately began coding the ray tracer, and here I am, three weeks later, writing an article about the finished code: Blackstar.
https://flannelhead.github.io/projects/blackstar.html
When I saw Interstellar in 2014, I was especially amazed by the black hole, Gargantua, that they had rendered. There’s no doubt the artistic license was extensively used there, but still, they used the Kerr metric to describe a spinning black hole and even published a scientific paper about it.
Then, a few months later, rantonels’ excellent article and Python code appeared on Hacker News. He was rendering a Schwarzschild black hole by means of ray tracing, making clever use of NumPy for fast calculations. You should definitely check out the article and the code — they’re awesome and you’ll most likely learn a lot!
As a numerical physics enthusiast, I began wondering if I could render such images myself. By the time, however, I wasn’t skilled enough in general relativity to grasp the theoretical side. I then noticed there was going to be a general relativity course held at the university next year. I decided to wait until that.
The course began and the patient waiting paid off. Soon enough I noticed the simplicity of the core ideas like geodesics, which were necessary to do this kind of a simulation. I immediately began coding the ray tracer, and here I am, three weeks later, writing an article about the finished code: Blackstar.
https://flannelhead.github.io/projects/blackstar.html