Simulations

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Simple lens simulation by MinuteLabs.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Electromagnetic wave simulation. Created by Falstad.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Simple light color mixing simulation, by Alex Larioza.

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

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

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.

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