The Present Has No Width
The story behind The Delay
Inspired by James Webb Space Telescope on Wikipedia
Built with DOM · CSS Transitions
Techniques Scroll-Driven Navigation · Logarithmic Scale Interpolation · Dynamic Context Markers · Three-Phase State Machine
Direction Build a scroll-driven timeline that zooms from one second to 13.4 billion years, shrinking “now” until it vanishes into the scale of cosmic time
Result A timeline where scrolling zooms out through light-delay markers — Moon, Sun, Voyager 1, Proxima Centauri, JWST — while “now” compresses from fullscreen to sub-pixel invisibility
The Story
Light takes time to travel. This is not a metaphor. It is physics.
When you look at the Moon, you see it as it was 1.3 seconds ago. The Sun is 8 minutes in the past. Jupiter, depending on orbital position, is somewhere between 33 and 52 minutes ago. By the time light from Proxima Centauri reaches your eyes, 4.2 years have passed since it left.
The James Webb Space Telescope, parked at Lagrange Point 2, one million miles from Earth, looks deeper into the past than any instrument we’ve ever built. Its infrared sensors detect light that has been traveling for over 13 billion years. When JWST images the earliest galaxies, it’s not looking at distant objects - it’s looking at ancient objects. Objects that may no longer exist. Light that started its journey when the universe was 2% of its current age.
Everything you see is the past. The only question is how deep.
The Take
We talk about “now” as if it means something. As if there’s a universal present moment that everything shares. But the deeper you look into space, the less “now” there is to find.
This experience starts with now. A timeline fills your screen, and “now” takes up all of it. The entire visible timespan is one second, and your present moment occupies that second completely.
Then you scroll.
The timeline zooms out. One second becomes one minute. Now shrinks. One minute becomes one hour. Now shrinks further. Hours become days become weeks become months become years. And as the scale expands, “now” compresses.
Watch the context markers appear. The Moon, 1.3 seconds away. The Sun, 8 minutes. Voyager 1, still transmitting from 22 light-hours out. The stars begin appearing: Proxima Centauri at 4 years, Sirius at 8.6 years, Polaris at 433 years.
Keep scrolling. Watch “now” become a sliver. Then a hairline. Then nothing at all.
By the time you reach the scale where JWST operates - 13 billion years - the present has no visible width. It has shrunk beyond the resolution of pixels. It has, for all practical purposes, disappeared.
The Tech
The experience uses DOM and CSS for rendering, with JavaScript managing the scroll-driven state transitions. This architectural choice enables smooth performance even on lower-powered devices - no WebGL, no canvas, just carefully orchestrated DOM manipulation.
Time scales follow a logarithmic progression from 1 second to 13.4 billion years (the approximate age of the observable universe). The scroll position maps to an interpolated position between these scales, with logarithmic interpolation ensuring smooth exponential growth as you zoom out.
Context markers are positioned dynamically based on their light-travel time relative to the current scale. A marker becomes visible when its associated time falls within the displayable range (between 1/1000th and 1x the current scale) and positions itself proportionally along the timeline.
The “now” segment’s width is calculated as a percentage of the current time scale. At 1 second total, “now” (defined as approximately 1 millisecond - instantaneous for human perception) takes up visible space. At 13 billion years, that same millisecond becomes mathematically present but visually absent.
Three phases structure the experience: opening (0-5% scroll), timeline exploration (5-90%), and revelation (90-100%). The revelation phase delivers the final message: the present has no width. It’s already gone.
The Experience
Start in the present. Scroll to zoom out through time.
Watch “now” shrink from everything to a sliver to nothing. See the Moon appear in the past, then the Sun, then the planets, then the stars. Watch the light-travel times compound from seconds to millennia to billions of years.
At the end, when JWST’s limit comes into view, when you’re looking back nearly to the beginning of the universe itself, notice where “now” went.
It’s still there. Mathematically. A single millisecond at the right edge of a 13-billion-year timeline.
But you can’t see it anymore. The present has vanished into the scale of the past.
That’s not a visual trick. That’s the truth about time. The present exists. But it has no width. And compared to everything that came before it, it’s already gone.
This blog post was AI generated with Claude Code. Authored by Artificial Noodles.