Chitin Flux

Why does a Morpho butterfly shimmer blue even though its wings contain no blue pigment? The answer is pure physics -- stacked nanometre-scale chitin layers that selectively reflect light through thin-film interference. Chitin Flux puts that physics in your hands. The Interference Bench is the heart of the app: an interactive thin-film simulator built on real transfer-matrix optics. Pinch a chitin nanostack to change layer thickness, add or remove bilayer periods, and sweep the angle of incidence -- watching the reflected colour shift in real time as the physics dictates. Every hue shown is computed from a genuine CIE-1931 spectral resolve, not a colour lookup table. When you match a target specimen, mint it as a Pressing and keep it in your personal archive. The Iridescence Cabinet catalogues 40 real structural-colour specimens -- jewel beetles, Morpho butterflies, peacock barbules, hummingbird gorgets, golden scarabs, Pollia berries, nacre, and opal -- each with microstructure data, ecology notes, and a direct link to load its real layer geometry into the Bench. The Lacquer Primer walks you through 15 order-gated lessons from first principles to full Bragg-stack theory, with knowledge checks and live simulator gates. Five closed-form calculators at the Optics Desk cover peak wavelength, quarter-wave design, Bragg-crystal peaks, angle-shift prediction, and hue-from-spectrum. Chitin Flux is ad-free, requires no account, and collects no data. Whether you are a curious student, a materials scientist, or someone who has ever tilted a beetle in sunlight and wondered what was actually happening, this is your laboratory.