Steric Quantum Gravity Now in 3D!

Four days ago, in my previous post, I said I need to illustrate my equations on steric quantum gravity in 3D. The reason for this statement was that it appeared that people weren’t able to fully understand what I meant without seeing the equations illustrated in 3D. While I had already shown the equations in 2D plots in projections in x-y, x-z and y-z dimensions, it seemed that these projections were too abstract. Sometimes the only way to form a 3D image in someone’s head is to draw it for them.

So, this is what I did. I already knew what I should do, at least in theory, but converting the equations to a 3D model wasn’t a walk in the park. Luckily, I’ve been learning illustration in Blender for almost four years, which meant that pretty much everything that needed to be done, I already knew, at least in broad terms.

But so as not to make things too easy, I first tried to do the illustration using a cheat. In the cheat the shape isn’t made piece by piece, but by making a toroidal helix and the winding a second helix (or two) around it. However, the problem was that it didn’t work. Apparently without the equations the entanglement of two closed-loop helices is pretty much impossible.

This meant that I had to figure out how to convert the equations into helical segments that precisely match the equations of my manuscript. Then I formed arrays of spheres that followed these segments. And finally, I duplicated these arrays, so that the shape would form a closed-loop entangled donut.

And this would have been enough but for one thing. The shape was extremely packed. It looked like a donut made of yellow and blue wedges, but any subsurface structure was hidden. Almost immediately I realized that the spheres had to be made transparent for the structure to be properly visible. However, when I made both colors half-transparent, it was hard to observe any details from either color. But when I kept the yellow spheres solid yellow and turned the blue spheres 90 % transparent, I finally got the desired effect.  The yellow helical segments were visible both on the outer and inner surface. And there were still the ghostly outlines of the blue spheres, showing what has been intentionally made see-through.

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/ed0781_5be3e37c95114e60bcc8aba4f29fc90a/720p/mp4/file.mp4

I’m pretty happy with this model. Although, this is just the first rough version of 3D model. Next, I need to combine the helical segments into two entangled toroidal helices. That way I can animate two arrays of spheres moving along the curves. In this model none of the curves are truly connected, so I can’t make the animation yet. Once the animation is ready, I should be able to fine-tune the sneaky theory of quantum gravity, but this time I need to write it into an explicit theory of steric quantum gravity. Apparently the reviewer didn’t realize that this was very much the main point of the paper.

I hope you like this model as much as I do.