The Chronicles · Research entry
Spin: a Live Ising Model You Cool by Scrolling
Active · September 2026
A two-dimensional Ising model running live in the browser on archaic.ie, the studio's Forge. Hot at the top of the page and cold at the bottom; scroll to cool it and watch domains form. The simulation is the ising-rs engine compiled to WebAssembly; the readout is words and a bar, never a number.
What you are looking at
Spin is a square lattice of spins, each one wanting to match its neighbours, with heat fighting that. At the top of the page the lattice is hot and reads as noise. Scroll down and it cools: domains appear, grow, and finally freeze. In between, at one temperature, structure appears at every size at once. That point is why physicists still study this model, and it is the reason the piece exists.
It is the simulation as the explanation. There is no chart beside it and no caption full of figures. The readout says hot, near critical, or cold, with a bar, because the point is what you can see, not what you can measure.
How it is built
The engine is ising-rs, the same Rust code that runs the GPU experiments, compiled to WebAssembly and stepped by a web worker so the page never stalls. Temperature follows the scroll position; the worker runs Metropolis sweeps at whatever temperature the reader has scrolled to, and the page asks it for a frame at a time.
The rendering is an ink wash rather than a grid of pixels: the spin field is smoothed and drawn by a small shader, with a copper tint on the domain walls, and a plain canvas fallback where WebGL is unavailable. A small external field lets the cold phase settle to ground instead of flickering between two equal states.
The piece is gated behind a photosensitivity notice, runs nothing until the reader agrees, and shows a still poster to anyone who prefers reduced motion. There is a Save button that hands you the current lattice as a picture.
Why it lives on archaic.ie
The Forge is where the studio keeps real things that are neither products nor papers. Spin is the first of them. The plan is one more piece a quarter from work that already exists: the phase transition with a live magnetisation, a Rule 110 tape, a folding visualiser from the zero-knowledge work. Each one the same shape: the widget is the essay.