physics

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Robert Bussard's 2006 Google Tech Talk on inertial electrostatic confinement fusion, a compact approach he argued could be cheap and clean, using boron-hydrogen fuel without neutron radiation. It runs about 93 minutes and covers the physics, funding history and his proposed development path.

Stuart Armstrong of the Future of Humanity Institute gives an Oxford physics talk on what exploratory engineering suggests about the Fermi paradox. He argues that von Neumann probes and Dyson spheres are plausibly buildable and asks what traces advanced civilizations would leave.

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.

Ron Garret's Google Tech Talk argues that quantum mechanics is no harder to understand than relativity and that popular accounts wrongly rely on the Copenhagen interpretation. He presents measurement as entanglement and explains phenomena like the quantum eraser.

Physicist Geoffrey West speaks at an FQXi conference on time about complexity and scaling laws. He covers how metabolism, growth and lifespan scale across organisms and how the same mathematics applies to cities and companies.

Sean Carroll's Talks at Google presentation of his book Something Deeply Hidden. He gives an accessible introduction to quantum mechanics and argues for the many-worlds interpretation and the emergence of spacetime.

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.

Neuroscientist Beau Lotto runs the audience through color and pattern illusions to show that perception is shaped by context and evolutionary history rather than being a direct readout of the world. The talk is playful and hands-on, and it argues that the brain interprets ambiguous signals.

SpaceX engineers present at NVIDIA's GPU Technology Conference on a multi-physics code that simulates the full-scale Raptor methane engine. It covers GPU-based turbulent combustion modeling with adaptive grids and wavelet compression.

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.

Google I/O 2011 session by Ray Cromwell and Philip Rogers on writing 2D and 3D games with HTML5 and GWT. It covers porting game libraries and physics engines, sharing code with Android, and publishing to the Chrome Web Store, and showcases the ForPlay library.

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.

Blizzard's Timothy Ford explains in this 2017 GDC session how Overwatch uses an Entity Component System architecture for layered gameplay. He also covers its server-authoritative netcode with client-side prediction and how they keep the game responsive and fair.

Daniel Stone, a longtime X and Wayland developer, explains at linux.conf.au 2013 why X11's design became untenable and what motivated Wayland. The talk walks through X's history and accumulated cruft.

Catherine West's RustConf 2018 closing keynote on building a game in Rust and organizing a large codebase. It builds up an entity component system and generational indices step by step.

Brian Karis's SIGGRAPH 2021 talk explains how Unreal Engine 5's Nanite virtualized geometry works. It covers mesh import, the data structures, streaming, decompression, culling, software and hardware rasterization, and shading.

Jonathan Blow speaks at UC Berkeley's CSUA about how to program independent games. He argues for keeping code simple, avoiding unnecessary work, and shipping.

Jonathan Blow's first talk on designing a new programming language for games, which became Jai. He explains the problems with C++ and why Go, Rust and D do not fit game development.

Casey Muratori's two-hour talk tracing the history of object-oriented programming back to the 1960s and examining how its ideas, and later entity component systems, came about. It is followed by a Q&A.

Miguel de Icaza's GodotCon 2023 talk on Swift bindings for Godot. He argues that garbage-collector pauses in C# are a persistent problem and that Swift's reference counting avoids them.

John Carmack's long QuakeCon 2012 keynote, a free-ranging talk covering software engineering, game platforms, game streaming, and his early head-mounted display and VR work.

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.

Valve's John McDonald presents at GDC 2018 on how Valve uses deep learning (VACnet) to detect cheaters in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. He covers training on human-reviewed replays and how model output is confirmed by manual review.

Media Molecule's Alex Evans recounts the journey, including the failures, of finding the Dreams engine, based on his Siggraph 2015 talk. It covers the signed-distance-field and splat-based rendering approach and the artistic goals behind it.

Mick Gordon's GDC 2017 session on composing the Doom (2016) soundtrack. He details his compositional process, production techniques and the experimental instrument and synth design behind the music.

Freya Holmer's Dutch Game Day 2023 talk asking why vectors can't be multiplied, building from complex numbers to a single axiom and arriving at geometric algebra, quaternions and multivectors.

Ian Hubert's Blender Conference talk on world building in Blender, covering photogrammetry, camera projection and assembling complex environments from simple shapes at great speed.

Oskar Stalberg explains how Wave Function Collapse assembles island dioramas from handcrafted tilesets in Bad North. He covers the theory, implementation, tooling, and how he blends art and technology.

Steven Wittens' JSConf US 2013 talk on drawing with WebGL, using animated visuals to walk through vectors, matrices and the rendering pipeline. Despite the title, it works as a visual primer on the linear algebra behind 3D graphics.

Bungie's David Aldridge explains the networking programming behind Halo: Reach in a 2011 GDC session. It covers how gameplay stays in sync online, including forecasting and state reconciliation.