physics experiment

Dennis Gustafsson, creator of Teardown, presents how he parallelized the physics solver for an upcoming game, followed by a Q&A. The talk was given at the Better Software Conference 2025.

Sandy Pentland of MIT presents his book on social physics, which uses big-data studies of how people interact to explain how ideas spread. He describes findings on collective intelligence and social influence.

Max Tegmark's MIT CBMM talk on why deep learning works so well. He argues that the laws of physics and the symmetries in physical data make it compressible into small neural networks, tying physics to network structure.

A 2015 talk by David Deutsch with slides and audio about constructor theory and how physics, in particular the many-worlds interpretation, can be framed without probability.

Spencer Lisenby explains dynamic soaring, a technique that lets unpowered radio-controlled gliders reach speeds above 835 kph. He covers the physics and the design, build and flying challenges.

Philosopher Daniel Dennett visits Google to discuss his book Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking, describing thought experiments and thinking tools across psychology, biology, computer science and physics.

Retired Boeing Technical Fellow Doug McLean walks through common misconceptions in aerodynamics, drawing on his book Understanding Aerodynamics. He critiques popular explanations of wing lift and rocket thrust and argues for arguing from the real physics.

Psychologist Philip Zimbardo explains how ordinary people can be pushed into doing evil by situations and systems. He draws on the Stanford prison experiment and unseen Abu Ghraib photos, then turns to the opposite case: how ordinary people can become heroes.

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.

David Deutsch's TED talk arguing that humanity's survival depends on solving problems through knowledge growth. He frames people as improbable "chemical scum" capable of understanding distant quasars.

In this 2019 GDC session, Petri Purho of Nolla Games explains the technical side of Noita's physics engine, including scaling a falling-sand simulation to large continuous worlds and adding destructible rigid bodies. It also shows how the emergent physics drives the gameplay.

Ron Garret tells the story of the Remote Agent Experiment on NASA's Deep Space 1, where autonomous software controlled a spacecraft in 1999. He describes debugging Lisp code remotely from millions of miles away.

Eric Seidel presents Sky, an experimental open-source framework for writing mobile apps in Dart with fast development cycles and 60Hz UI. Sky later became Flutter.

Bryan Cantrill's Craft 2019 talk on the ethical dilemmas software engineers face as software eats the world. He explores cases where engineering thinking conflicts with the law or personal morals, including Facebook's news feed experiments.

Gary Wilson's TEDxGlasgow talk argues that internet pornography hyperstimulates the brain's reward system and can cause symptoms that reverse when people stop. TED notes that several claims are not supported by respected academic studies.

Ruben Meerman presents a TEDx talk on the stoichiometry of weight loss, showing with lab demonstrations where fat goes when it is lost. He argues that most of it is exhaled as carbon dioxide.

Colin Smith introduces Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics and his Clojure port, sicmutils. He shows how higher-order functions and a symbolic algebra system can represent Lagrangian mechanics.

Theoretical physicist Nima Arkani-Hamed gives a public talk on why spacetime may not be fundamental and what might replace it, including newer approaches to scattering amplitudes.

TED talk by biochemist Cynthia Kenyon on how a simple genetic mutation can double the lifespan of the worm C. elegans, and what that suggests about extending healthy human life.

Psychologist Melanie Joy's TEDxMunchen talk introduces carnism, the invisible belief system that conditions people to eat some animals but not others, and how it shapes reactions to food choices.

David Foster Wallace's 2005 commencement speech at Kenyon College, about the default settings of the mind, choosing what to pay attention to, and what we end up worshipping.

A short edited excerpt of Terence McKenna arguing that culture acts as an operating system for the mind, set to imagery and music. It touches on psychedelics and how they change thinking.

Daniel Dennett gives a Royal Institution talk toward a unified theory of information, tying together evolution, learning and engineering. He argues that design can arise bottom-up through small steps without a designer.

A short video of David Foster Wallace's 'This Is Water' commencement speech about awareness and choosing how to think. It argues that the most obvious realities are the hardest to see, using the fish-in-water parable.

An RSA Animate adaptation of a Slavoj Zizek talk on charitable giving and ethical consumerism. It argues that buying products that bundle a charity donation can sustain the system that causes the problems.

George Hotz gives a SXSW 2019 talk on the idea that we live in a simulation and asks what actions would be available from inside it. He takes a hacker's view of whether it could be escaped.

Slavoj Zizek discusses his book Violence in an Authors@Google talk in New York. He covers ideology, including his idea of the unknown knowns.

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.

An Intelligence Squared debate in which Will Self argues for Brave New World and Adam Gopnik for Nineteen Eighty-Four as the better dystopian warning. It includes acted excerpts and is chaired by Jonathan Freedland.

Gary Yourofsky's 2010 lecture at Georgia Tech arguing for veganism on ethical, health and environmental grounds. It is a long, forceful animal-rights speech.

Physicist David Deutsch's TED talk on why science took off, arguing that good explanations are those that are hard to vary. It contrasts scientific explanation with myth.

An excerpt from an RSA event in which physicist David Deutsch makes the case for optimism as a driver of progress in the 21st century. It is a short highlight of a longer discussion.

Sam Harris's talk at the 2012 Global Atheist Convention on the secular attitude toward death and living in the present moment, with a guided meditation element.

Social psychologist Melanie Joy introduces the concept of carnism, the belief system that conditions people to eat some animals but not others.

Philosopher Dan Dennett argues in a TED talk that we do not understand our own consciousness and that our brains often fool us. He uses perceptual examples, including a painting that invites the viewer to fill in detail.

John Searle's Talk at Google on consciousness and artificial intelligence, hosted by Google's Singularity Network. He presents his philosophy of mind and Chinese room argument that computation is syntactic and cannot capture semantics.

A talk given at the 2011 Nammour Symposium at Sacramento State arguing that past generations were wrong about nearly everything, so we should expect to be wrong too. It tours the many surprising ways scientific beliefs have failed, drawing on pessimistic induction.

Alain de Botton gives a TED talk questioning how we define success and failure. He argues that snobbery and the assumption that outcomes are fully earned make career anxiety worse.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb talks at Google about his book Antifragile, on systems that gain from disorder and volatility. It draws on themes from his earlier books.

Ramesh Raskar presents femto-photography, a technique that captures a trillion frames per second, fast enough to show light itself moving through a scene. He discusses possible uses such as cameras that see around corners or inside the body.