Ginnungagap

The name

In Norse cosmology, Ginnungagap is the void that existed before anything else. Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda (c. 1220) places it between Niflheim, a world of ice and mist in the north, and Muspelheim, a world of fire in the south.

Rime from the north crept into the gap. Where it met the heat of the south it thawed, and from the dripping meltwater came Ymir, the first being. The gods later built the world from his body and set it in the middle of the gap.

The older poem Völuspá recalls that moment in one line: gap var ginnunga, en gras hvergi (“there was a yawning gap, and grass nowhere”). The meaning of ginnunga is still debated. It may come from a root meaning “to gape”, from one meaning “to deceive”, or from the prefix ginn-, which marks things as vast and charged with power.

The project

Ginnungagap is a laboratory for the physics of extreme places, built so you can see what the equations predict instead of only reading them.

Every image is computed from physical law. Light is traced along geodesics of curved spacetime, gas glows at the temperature the theory assigns it, and the numbers beside each view come from the same equations that draw it.

The first module is a Schwarzschild black hole with a thin accretion disk. You can change its mass, move around it, and switch individual relativistic effects on and off to see how each one shapes the picture.

The second puts Earth and the Moon where they are right now, at true scale, and draws the curvature of spacetime around them. Add planets or spacecraft, and compare how fast clocks tick in different places.