Quest for Entropy — interactive demos

Small machines you can poke, one per idea in the series. Everything runs in your browser; there is no server and no randomness beyond what each page declares.

Episode 1 · The Universe with No Dice

The Cloud of Maybes

Thousands of identical clockwork pendulums, started a hair's width apart, smear into a probability-looking cloud. Toggle to the rotor weave — the fingerprint quantum mechanics actually has.

Look, and the Stripes Die

A two-slit screen filled dot by counted dot from a deterministic clock — stripes with no wave and no dice. One toggle files the path information, and the stripes die.

Episode 2 · The Machine

The Machine

The actual toy from the research code, running in your browser: a state turns, you compare three lengths and write the biggest one on a tape, and a pool of 96 rotors hands over the six numbers the machine rebuilds the state from. Flip the observer between WATCH and FOLD and the tally changes.

Episode 4 · I Never Understood Entropy

The Break Shot

A few hundred identical billiard tables, started a nanometre apart, blur into a cloud while the physics forgets nothing. Two knobs — how wrong your starting knowledge is, and how carefully you are looking. Turn the resolution knob and watch the same run report a different entropy. Then rewind the exact table, with a dial for how many digits you kept.

Episode 11 · The Observer That Had To Touch

The Ceiling

Three snapshots of one system, and a score. Drag the gap anywhere you like while only watching, and the counted score never passes 1 — the panel below shows why: every single run scores +1 or −3, and there is no third option. Then switch the observer from looking to touching, set the gap to 60°, and watch it reach 1.5.

Episode 15 · What Time Is

Two Observers, One History

Three processes doing things and messaging each other, with no clock anywhere. Click any event and watch its past, its future and its elsewhere light up in both the engineer's diagram and the physicist's one — the same picture, turned ninety degrees. Ask another observer and get a different log of the same history, with a counter proving that not one causally ordered pair ever swaps. Then turn the speed-of-light dial and watch "elsewhere" grow and shrink.

These are classical demonstrations about determinism and limited knowledge. They are NOT quantum mechanics and claim nothing about nature. The research behind the series, and its measured limits, live in the articles at the Quest for Entropy Substack.