When light passes through something transparent that isn't perfectly flat — the surface of a swimming pool, the curved side of a glass — it bends. Where it bends toward other rays, the light concentrates into bright patches. Where it bends away, the light thins out. The result is that shimmering network of bright lines and moving patches you see on the bottom of a pool on a sunny day. That phenomenon is called caustics, and its characteristic shape appears any time light moves through a curved or turbulent transparent medium — water, glass, or agitated air above intense heat.
The simulation models exactly this: a bounded volume of turbulent, irregularly shaped transparent medium, lit from within, producing the caustic pattern in real time. The interior of the volume is filled with a continuously shifting noise field — a mathematical way of generating smooth, organic-looking turbulence that moves and churns without repeating. The turbulence is stretched vertically so that the patterns inside tend to rise rather than drift randomly, which is what happens physically in a thermal column where hot air rises in elongated convective cells. The result looks like fire.
The five-layer structure from Ezekiel 1:4 — storm wind, great cloud, fire infolding on itself, brightness around it, and the chashmal at the center — maps directly to the radial structure of the model from outside to inside. The color follows the LXX translation of chashmal as electrum, a gold-silver alloy: white-silver at the core, amber in the fire layer, warm haze at the outer boundary.
The one thing the model is careful not to claim is that this is what was physically happening. It's a visual analogy — an attempt to reconstruct what Ezekiel actually saw and described, using physics that can account for that appearance. Everything in the model corresponds to something the original witness could have perceived. Nothing is imported from modern physics that would have been invisible to an ancient observer.