TITLE: Dyson's Hope
NAME: Warwick Allison
COUNTRY: Norway
EMAIL: warwick@troll.no
TOPIC: Physics & Math
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: dyson.jpg
ZIPFILE: dyson.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    Povray 3.0

TOOLS USED: 
    Lots of C++ code.

RENDER TIME: 
    2 hours

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium Pro 200, 128M RAM

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


In the 1960's, physicist Freeman J. Dyson postulated three levels of
civilization, the third being those that consumed so much of the energy
output of their star that the star would appear on scans as only a dim
radiant heat source.  This image, "Dyson's Hope", postulates that however
advanced a civilization becomes, the complexity of the universe will
find a devastating way show them that they still haven't studied enough
physics.  The title is prompted by this quote from Dyson:

   "Goedel proved that the world of pure mathematics is inexhaustible;
   no finite set of axioms and rules of inference can ever encompass
   the whole of mathematics; given any finite set of axioms, we can
   find meaningful mathematical questions which the axioms leave
   unanswered. I hope that an analogous situation exists in the
   physical world. If my view of the future is correct, it means that
   the world of physics and astronomy is also inexhaustible; no matter
   how far we go into the future, there will always be new things
   happening, new information coming in, new worlds to explore, a
   constantly expanding domain of life, consciousness, and memory.  

            Freeman J. Dyson - http://www.hia.com/pcr/dyson.html
            Reviews of Modern Physics, Vol. 51, No. 3, July 1979
            (C) 1979 American Physical Society

The image depicts a `Dyson Sphere' suffering from a calamity of
stellar proportions - a `Type III' civilization experiencing the
consequences of a limitless universe.



DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

The sphere of objects was created by using a modified version of Jon Leech's
`Points' program for distributing points about a sphere.  My program then
calculates the maximum radius for each object, connections to closest
neighbours, and some pseudo-ballistics for the objects withing the collision
radius.  It was particularly difficult because povray doesn't share data
for reused objects (presumably to save on matrix multiplications):  the image
took over 64Mbytes to trace.  I originally intended to create the image in
correct scale, but for the sake of art, your viewing pleasure, and the
swap partition on my available hardware, I had to stop at 10000 points.

The destructive phenomenon is two halos carefully positioned and scaled
inside the union of a sphere and a cone.  It's the most effort I've ever
put into a texture for such simple objects!