A little Python animation showing the evolution of the causal horizon during cosmic inflation. Made by Maria Jose Bustamante Rosell and Robbie Rosati.
Have you ever wondered “How far away will my screams reach?”? Well, here is the ultimate answer. It doesn’t get any less causally connected than this. Here we introduce INFLATION SIMULATOR 9000. Be it that you started screaming at the beggining of the universe, of rather late (during radiation dominated era) we can tell you how far away they will ever reach!
To run a pre-compiled version of the game, download and unzip the file for your OS from the releases page:
https://github.com/rjrosati/inflation-simulation/releases/latest . Then double-click the executable. For Mac and Linux the executable is named universe
, on Windows it’s universe.exe
.
The simulation will begin paused.
To download this script, click on the green “clone or download” button right above the list of files. If you have git
installed, you can clone the repository, or you can download the current version as a zip file.
If you don’t have Python
installed, we recommend you install the Anaconda distribution (for Python 3), which comes packaged with numpy
. https://www.continuum.io/downloads
You’ll then need to run pip install pygame
.
On Mac or Linux, open a terminal in the script’s folder and type
$> python ./universe.py
On Windows, hold down Shift and right-click in the script’s folder. Choose “Open Command Window Here”. Type:
C:\Users\...\inflation-simulation> python universe.py
The units are arbitrary at the moment. A switch to Planck units will be coming in the near future.
We are not solving the full FRW equations here, especially not when switching from inflation to radiation domination.
If we solved the full equations of motion, we wouldn’t be able to stay in inflation arbitrarily long.
You might notice some irregularites if you end inflation before a(t)=10 or so (like light going backwards).
This is an artefact of the approximations we are using and isn’t physical.
If anyone has an easy fix, feel free to message or submit a pull request.
The music is Hybrid Song from TeleportProkg.