computational universe

The American Museum of Natural History's film flies from the Himalayas out through the atmosphere and solar system to the afterglow of the Big Bang, using its Digital Universe Atlas four-dimensional map.

A roughly four-and-a-half-hour Lex Fridman podcast conversation with Stephen Wolfram about his Wolfram Physics Project and a fundamental theory of physics, computation, life and the universe.

Kurzgesagt explores the idea that black holes could create universes and that we might live inside one. It builds up the physics of how density falls as black holes get larger.

Kurzgesagt explores the idea that life might have arisen shortly after the Big Bang, when the whole universe was warm enough to be habitable. It discusses what that would mean for the origin and spread of life.

Lawrence Krauss's 2009 talk on the current picture of the universe, how it will end and how it could have come from nothing. It covers the expanding universe, cosmic background radiation and the cosmological constant.

Joscha Bach's 32C3 talk applies computational theories of mind to questions of meaning, emotion, and love, asking how computation can explain irrational-seeming human experience.

The first episode of Caltech's The Mechanical Universe, a 52-part introductory university physics series. David Goodstein introduces ideas from Copernicus to Newton, linking the physics of the heavens and the earth with computer animation.

A Disney Research SIGGRAPH 2013 demo of an interactive system that lets non-experts design animated mechanical characters. The user sketches motion curves and the system generates optimized mechanisms and gear trains for 3D printing.

An 11-minute animated introduction to P vs. NP and the wider landscape of complexity classes, inspired by the Complexity Zoo wiki. It assumes no background in computer science.

Joscha Bach's 31c3 talk argues that the mind should be understood as an information-processing system and that even the physical universe can be seen as computational. It tours the philosophy underlying artificial intelligence and cognitive science.

A PBS Space Time episode asking whether our universe could sit inside a black hole. It covers what physicists think happens inside black holes and the arguments for and against this idea.

The first lecture in an 18-part series on digital photography from Marc Levoy's Stanford CS 178 course, recorded at Google in 2016. The series covers how digital cameras work and computational photography, with slides and assignments available on the course site.

A PBS Space Time episode explaining the holographic principle: the idea that our 3+1 dimensional universe may be described by information on a lower-dimensional boundary. It walks through black hole entropy and the AdS/CFT correspondence.

CGP Grey explains the elegant ratio of A4 and the metric paper sizes, then zooms out across scales from the Planck length to the observable universe.

Physicist Roger Penrose and philosopher William Lane Craig discuss the origin of the universe on the Unbelievable? show. Topics include Penrose's three realms of reality, conformal cyclic cosmology and whether fine tuning points to a creator.

PBS Space Time explains Roger Penrose's conformal cyclic cosmology, in which the far future of our universe becomes the big bang of the next. It explores what could come after the universe ends.

Kurzgesagt explains why, even with science-fiction technology, most of the universe is permanently out of reach because of cosmic expansion and finite resources.

A PBS Space Time episode asking whether time began at the Big Bang. It explains that the Big Bang is not what most people were taught and what 'start' of the universe really means.

Sabine Hossenfelder explains how special relativity leads to the block universe, in which past, present and future all exist equally, and asks what that means for whether the past still exists.

Veritasium explains the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, drawing heavily on Sean Carroll's book. It walks through the Schrodinger equation and why wave collapse may be unnecessary if the universe keeps splitting.

The 2016 Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate, moderated by Neil deGrasse Tyson, in which a panel of physicists and philosophers debates whether the universe is a simulation. Participants include David Chalmers, Zohreh Davoudi and James Gates.

A very short clip of Carl Sagan saying that to make an apple pie from scratch you must first invent the universe. It illustrates how everything depends on a chain of prior things.

A short Tim and Eric Awesome Show sketch, The Universe I, II & III, in which the cosmos is shown in a deliberately absurd way. It is an Adult Swim surreal comedy bit.

A Kurzgesagt animation on supernovae, the most powerful explosions in the universe. It explains their role in creating elements and what would happen to Earth if one occurred nearby.

Pannenkoek2012's commentated tool-assisted Super Mario 64 run collecting the Watch for Rolling Rocks star with half an A press, using parallel universes and QPU movement. The video is marked outdated in favor of a newer version.

The Eames Office's 1977 film Powers of Ten starts at a picnic in Chicago and zooms out by a factor of ten every ten seconds to the edge of the universe. It then zooms inward to a proton in a carbon atom.

Douglas Adams gives a talk at UCSB, recorded shortly before his death, about the odd lives of animals and what they suggest about humanity's future. It draws on his Last Chance to See work and is funny and wide-ranging.

David Tong, a Cambridge theoretical physicist, explains at the Royal Institution that the fundamental building blocks of nature are quantum fields rather than particles. He covers what we know about these fields and how they fit into the Standard Model.

An Every Frame a Painting video essay asking why Marvel films lack memorable musical themes. It blames temp tracks and directors scoring to filler music.

Sean Carroll introduces his video series on the biggest ideas in physics, such as symmetry, space and matter, as informal discussions with follow-up Q&A videos. This is the short opening video of the series.

A visual scale comparison of stars and cosmic objects, from planets up to some of the largest known stars, set to music. It is meant to convey the vastness of the universe.

A long Lex Fridman interview with Stephen Wolfram on complexity, cellular automata, computational irreducibility and the Wolfram Physics Project.

PBS Space Time explains the Hubble constant tension, in which two precise, independent methods of measuring the universe's expansion rate disagree. It covers why this calls some standard cosmology into question.

Joscha Bach's 35C3 talk offers an AI perspective on the soul, covering perception, mental representation, agency, consciousness and selfhood as things that can arise in a computational system like the brain.

Lex Fridman interviews physicist Roger Penrose on consciousness, the limits of computation, quantum mechanics and his cyclic cosmology. It covers his views on AI and the big bang.

Max Brunsfeld of GitHub presents Tree-sitter, a parsing system for programming tools that supports incremental, error-tolerant parsing. He demos its integration into GitHub.com and Atom for syntax highlighting and code navigation.

Kurzgesagt explains black hole stars, a hypothesized kind of giant star with a black hole at its core that could be a route to early supermassive black holes.

The BBC TV version of the Babel Fish passage from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, with Ford and Arthur aboard a Vogon ship, narrated over the show's hand-drawn animated Guide entry.

A screencast showing how to use the fzf command-line fuzzy finder in the shell and in Vim. It covers searching files and also using the Vim plugin for help tags, buffers, lines and grep matches.

Veritasium explains how cosmic rays and other particles flip bits in computer memory, with examples including a Belgian election count error, plane incidents and game glitches. It is inspired by a RadioLab episode on bit flips.