Posted 12/27/2014 18:00:00

An inspiration for this storyline is the short story "All You Zombies" by Robert Heinlein, except instead of being his own mother and father, Mike is his own Ph.D. advisor. Which is way creepier.

And I ended up writing a Newton's Cradle simulator in POV-Ray for this comic. I had looked online to see if someone had already done one, but the closest I found was this Newton's Cradle POV-Ray model in which he simply plugged in the solution for one ball moving rather than actually simulating the motion. I ended up "borrowing" the POV-Ray model for the Newton's Cradle but then writing my own simulator for its motion.

My simulator isn't the most accurate (it assumes pairwise interactions only and it assumes elastic collisions), but it works pretty well. I've put a copy of the simulator here if you want to try it out.