Case study · SIMULATION · 2607.SIM.01
The Evolution: four physics simulators, one HTML file each
Why does blast damage radius scale with the cube root of yield?
Blast radius scales with the cube root of yield because the energy of a blast fills a volume, and volume grows with the cube of distance — so a thousandfold bigger explosion reaches only about ten times further (Hopkinson–Cranz scaling). AEON, one of The Evolution's four simulators, is built on exactly that law, verified against published reference figures.
- Simulators
- 4
- Lines
- ≈5,000 total
- Dependencies
- 0
- AEON physics checks
- 85 against published figures
- Smoke test
- 210 scenarios · 3,682 frames
01The problem it solves
Some things are too large, too fast, too slow or too violent for intuition to hold — the effects of a weapon, the life of a universe, evolution itself. The Evolution's premise: model them, animate them on a timeline, and let a non-expert feel the scale.
02What he built
Four simulators, no dependencies
AEON (weapons consequences), COSMOS (the life and death of a universe), GENLIFE (organisms with genomes and neural brains, speciating under selection) and GENESIS (a particle-and-gravity sandbox). Each is one HTML file — no build step, no server, no network access — about 5,000 lines across the four.
AEON: every zone from a published model
Air blast via Hopkinson–Cranz cube-root scaling from Glasstone & Dolan; thermal fluence with atmospheric attenuation; prompt radiation; a Lagrangian fallout plume after WSEG-10 with Way–Wigner t^-1.2 decay; cratering and seismic magnitude; Kinney & Graham for conventional explosives; Karzas & Latter for EMP; OTA casualty curves. Terrain shadows the blast; a logarithmic timeline runs from 0.1 ms to 48 hours.
03 — THE HARDEST DECISIONTest the physics like code
A simulator that draws for effect is easy; one that is right is not. AEON ships with 85 physics checks against published reference values — the cube-root law to 1e-9, the 1 Mt 5 psi radius at 7.00 km, optimum burst height 178 m at 1 kt — plus a headless smoke test that runs the real renderer through 210 scenarios (3,682 frames, 84,262 draw calls) against a canvas mock that throws on anything a browser would reject.
Scope is a decision too: AEON models consequences only — no weapon design, construction or targeting information — and states that its casualty figures are upper-bound estimates with wide error bars.
04The result
Four simulators that open in any browser and run offline, with numbers that trace to sources. AEON's yield slider spans seven orders of magnitude, and the cube-root law is why one exponent can cover them all.
RESEARCHResearch findings from this project
R-01Cube-root scaling as the spine of a consequence model
A thousandfold increase in yield multiplies the damage radius by ten, not a thousand — one exponent covers seven orders of magnitude.
R-02Lagrangian parcels instead of an ellipse
Fallout dose becomes a function of position and time-since-detonation — activity falls ~100× in the first two days (Way–Wigner t^-1.2).
NOTESQuestions this project answers
STACKTech stack
- Vanilla JS
- Canvas 2D
- Zero deps