Simulations

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

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

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.

A slick simulation of particles flying around a black hole. 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.

Electromagnetic wave simulation. Created by Falstad.

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

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

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

Simple light color mixing simulation, by Alex Larioza.

Simple simulation: draw an iceberg, and see how it will float in the water. Inspired by the idea that icebergs are often drawn incorrectly. Made by joshdata.

Simulate solar eclipses, even on other planets and with other moons. Created by MinuteLabs.

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

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

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

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

Fascinating simulator that gives you a lot of power to change the rules of the world, adding in various forces, rules, and objects. Can create some interesting things. Built by lisyarus.

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.

A customizable toy of a double pendulum. Created by MinuteLabs.

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

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

Simple lens simulation by MinuteLabs.

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

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

Have you ever wanted to evolve mold? Here, you can evolve mold. Created by erytau.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Turn your phone into a physics lab. Graph things like acceleration, pressure, and magnetic field. Very powerful stuff. Created by RWTH Aachen University.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Downloadable space simulation that lets you smash planets together in a really cool way. Created by Giant Army.

See a globe of earth, but back in history, millions of years ago. Watch the techtonic plates move, and see where in Pangaea your house was.

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

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

A simulation of falling sand and so much more, a surprising amount of physics built into this toy. Created by the R74n Collective.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

An explorable explanation of the orbits around a spinning black hole. Created by Dr. Leo Stein.