What you're looking at
Each point in the field is following the Lorenz equations, a model of churning air that Edward Lorenz studied in 1963. Start two points side by side and their paths soon split apart completely. No path ever repeats.
Yet every point stays on the same two-winged shape, forever. That shape is a strange attractor: chaos with a hidden order. It's the idea behind the name, and the way we like to build software.
The colors show depth: indigo at the back, white at the front. The orange point is a single path you can follow around the loop.
dx/dt = σ (y − x)
dy/dt = x (ρ − z) − y
dz/dt = x y − β z
σ = 10 ρ = 28 β = 8/3