Drop two stones in a pond and the ripples cross. Where two crests meet, the water jumps higher than either stone managed alone. Where a crest meets a dip, nothing moves. That is interference, and it is why a single electron, fired at a wall with two holes in it, lands in stripes.
Twelve of them, running live. Each one is a small program rather than a video: it works out a colour for every pixel, sixty times a second, so you can slow it down, re-colour it, drag it back and forth in time, or take a copy away. Some are quantum outright, some are a bucket of water, and each one tells you which.
Try the interactive versionMake the ripples yourself, with a click or with your hands on cameraColour carries information here. Where a field shows intensity, the darkest stop of the palette is zero and the lightest is the maximum for that field. Where it shows phase, the palette runs once round as a closed cycle and brightness falls to nothing wherever the phase has no single value, which is why the vortex cores read as black pinpricks rather than as gaps in the drawing.
Every field except One at a time is periodic, and the number beside its title is that period at normal speed. Recording a clip records exactly one period, so the file loops without a cut. The accumulating field has no period, only a history, so it records a fixed ten seconds instead.
The physics is simulated rather than measured: these are the standard textbook fields evaluated per pixel, tuned for legibility rather than for a particular apparatus. Wavelengths and source spacings are chosen so the structure reads at this size. Where a panel names a real experiment, the experiment is real and the picture is an illustration of it.