Geodesics and Black Holes

Geodesics are the paths light rays take in different media, they can be described as the "shortest path" between two points in a manifold. We explore how the calculus of variations enables us to solve for geodesics in everyday systems as well as at the cosmologic scale.

These are intrinsic views ray-traced in R^4 following solutions to Schwarzschild geodesics.

And this is an extrinsic view of Schwarzschild geodesics after the time-coordinate is projected out.

Music "Everything" by Vi Hart