cloud chamber

what is this

A real cloud chamber is a sealed tank of supersaturated vapor. When a charged particle — a cosmic ray, a speck of background radiation — tears through it, it ionizes a thin line of the gas, and vapor condenses along that line into a visible streak. Different particles leave different tracks: heavy ones plow short, thick, straight paths; light ones curl; some decay mid-flight into a little V of daughter tracks.

This one watches the live Bluesky firehose instead of the sky. Every new post is a detection event, sorted into one of eight species by what its record actually contains, then given a track shaped like its physical namesake:

• muon — a plain text post. Long, straight, thin — muons are the most common thing a real ground-level detector ever sees, same as a plain post is the most common thing here.
• electron — a reply. Light, curls hard and jitters, same as a reply curls back into a thread.
• positron — a quote post. Electron's antimatter twin, curls the other way.
• proton — a video embed. Heavy, thick, penetrates deep.
• alpha — an image embed. Very heavy, short, thick, barely bends.
• gamma — a hashtag. Uncharged — travels dead straight, bright, no curve.
• neutrino — a link embed. Barely interacts with anything — a thin, faint, almost-invisible straight dash.
• kaon — a mention. Travels a short way, then decays mid-flight into a pair of faint diverging daughter tracks — a classic "V" in a real bubble chamber.

The sensitivity slider caps how many detections get drawn per second — the firehose runs far hotter than any real detector, so most cosmic rays pass through ungraphed. Nothing is stored; everything here evaporates in a few seconds, same as the real thing.

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