Simulations

Simple tool for exploring the night sky at different wavelengths of light. Built by Lowe, Simpson, and North.

Basic and easy-to-use simulation for light curving around a black hole. Created by Thomas Müller.

A beautiful simulation of a fluid that’s quite fun to play with. Mesmorizing… Built by Pavel Dobryakov.

Cool look at gravity of many, many bodies, calculated on a mesh. Looks neat, too. Created by Ricky Reusser.

Scroll up on this webpage and take yourself higher and higher, exploring “What’s up there?” with fun cartoony graphics. Created by neal.fun.

A simple gravity simulator for the web. Created by Hermann.

Have you ever wanted to walk backward into a black hole? Fly through a wormhole? Now’s your chance in this relativistic simulation. Based on the setup in the movie Interstellar, and created by sirXemic.

Web based oscilloscope, with a variety of settings to explore, among them the ability to use your microphone to input the wave pattern. Created by Neil Thapen.

An evolution simulator heavily based in biology, built by Revolutionary Game Studio.

Some interesting simulations about how eyes work to see the world. Created by Ala’, Andrew, Jason, Peter, and Tanya.

Build tons of 2D physics simulations with this free resource. Easy to check out, tons of cool stuff you can do with it. Created by Dimitris Xanthopoulos.

Fascinating simulation where you can add and move objects in 4 dimensions. On mobile or pc, and created by mtb design works.

Easy-to-use simulator for modeling electric fields around point charges. Created by Ithaca College.

Simple lens simulation by MinuteLabs.

Draw the bones and muscles for your stick-figure creatures, and evolve them into better racers. Built by Keiwando.

An interactive blog post about waves, their shapes, adding them together, and harmonics.

Particle simulation that is great for exploring thermodynamics, or Newtonian mechanics, gas laws, etc. Created by Dan Schroeder.

An interactive book about geology and earth science, available for iPad and Mac. Created by Chaim Gingold.

Investigate systems that interact, such as the predator-prey population dynamics and much, much more. Created by Nicky Case.

A simulation of the spacetime around a Schwarzschild black hole where you can fling astroids and light to your heart’s content. Created by TestTubeGames.

Pixel based simulation of life, where each color represents a type of cell for the organism. Over time organisms evolve in their virtual environment. Created by Max Robinson.

Cool phone app that can turn your device into a physics sensor, measuring things like sound, acceleration, light, etc. Created by Vieyra Software.

App that lets you explore a tesseract, built by Lunar Skydiving.

Investigating molecules bouncing around in a piston in various states of matter. Good thermodynamics simulations by PhET.

Evolving creature simulator where the creatures are basically 3D sets of boxes. Built by Evol Games.

Scroll down the page and explore what energies match what masses, according to the famous equation E=mc^2. Created by MinuteLabs.

Particles bouncing around in a box, with lots of options for changing the setup. Includes thermodynamic quantities, too. Built by Falstad.

The math of how Thai fireflies time themselves. Created by Nicky Case.

Blog post about Entropy, full of interactive simulations. Written clearly and understandably, also with sheep. Created by Aatish Bhatia.

A slick simulation of particles flying around a black hole. Created by Ricky Reusser.

Surprisingly powerful tool for creating circuits and seeing their behavior, created by Falstad.

An interactive video that lets you explore the math and patterns of virus structures. Created by Hamish Todd.

A simulated swing, with some tools for exploring the physics behind pumping your legs. Created by TestTubeGames.

A to-scale model of the solar system in a browser window. Created by Josh Worth.

Basically lets you recreate The Game of Life, but with emoji and any rules you’d like to put in. Created by Nicky Case.

Evolution simulator where little creatures swim around and evolve. A deep amount of complexity. Created by Léo Caussan.

Electromagnetic wave simulation. Created by Falstad.

An easy-to-use rocket simulator. See if you can build a ship that can make it to space, the moon, or further. Now see if you can do it safely. Free demo versions available on certain platforms.

Fun toy that lets you play with a Reaction Diffusion System, a simulation that easily makes interesting patterns and has a connection to how biological systems grow. Created by pmeila.

Nice tool for easily creating and testing simple circuits, built by PhET.

Very cool 3D astronomical simulations, running right in the browser. Created by Darrell Huffman.

A look at the quantum mechanics behind Bell’s Inequality, using a casino as an example. Built as a long blog post with many interactives along the way. Created by Adam Becker.

Excellent web simulator for optics, with a wide range of lenses, mirrors, prisms, and other objects you can add. Created by Yi-Ting Tu.

Fly through the universe near the speed of light, and experience the relativistic effects of length contraction and time dilation. Can you make it to Andromeda in one raptor’s lifetime? Built by TestTubeGames.

A nice interactive look at three-body orbits that repeat. Created by Ricky Reusser.

An interactive explorable about the physics behind gears. Created by Bartosz Ciechanowski.

Crawling stick figure creatures evolve before your eyes. Created by TestTubeGames.

An evolving creature simulator where the creature are boxes stuck together into piles. Built by Evol Games.

Fling planets and change physics in this gravity sandbox. Available in browser and for download. Created by TestTubeGames.

Scrollable explorer where you can see what’s in the deep ocean, the deeper you go. By Neal.fun.

Simulation for investigating waves and interference, with a bunch of customizable physics options. Created by Falstad.

Long blog post about the physics behind bicycles. Full of interactives, and very cleanly done. Covers an absurd amount of mechanics. Created by Bartosz Ciechanowski.