29 Physics Games You Can Play in Your Browser Right Now

Physics stops being abstract the moment you can throw things at walls, crash virtual spaceships into the Moon, and see what happens when you fire a neutron at uranium-235.

SciFunLab now has 29 interactive physics games you can play directly in your browser — no installs, no account, completely free. Here's a quick tour of what's in the lab.

Forces and Motion

Newton's Cannon — Fire a cannonball from a mountain. Increase the speed and watch it skip off the Earth's atmosphere into orbit. At exactly the right velocity (≈7.9 km/s for low Earth orbit), it never lands. The game builds intuition for orbital mechanics that surprises even students who've solved the textbook equations.

Lunar Lander — Land on the Moon with real 1/6th-Earth gravity and limited fuel. Three progressively harder levels, mobile-friendly controls. Much harder than it looks, and oddly satisfying when you nail it.

Roller Coaster — Build a coaster and see whether it completes the loop. Edit track segments and watch where the physics breaks (or where your passengers would become weightless).

Bumper Cars — Elastic and inelastic collisions made tactile. Hit the cars, watch momentum transfer, and feel the difference between a rubber ball bounce and a clay blob smash.

Electricity and Circuits

Electric Field Hockey — Score goals by placing positive and negative charges that deflect a puck. Five levels, increasing difficulty. Excellent for building intuition about Coulomb's law without a single equation.

Charge Fields — Drag charges onto a canvas and watch the electric potential map update in real time. Equipotential lines, field line tracing, and a probe that shows you V and |E| at any point.

Circuit Builder — Wire up resistors, capacitors, voltage sources, and switches. Ohm's law, Kirchhoff's laws, series/parallel — all live in the diagram you draw.

Resistor Network — Eight increasingly complex puzzles: series, parallel, Wheatstone bridge, ladder networks, delta-Y transforms. Step-by-step solution explanations, randomizable values.

Energy

Energy Skate Park — Drag control points to build a half-pipe or any custom track. Watch kinetic energy convert to potential energy and back, with heat losses from friction accumulating over time.

Pendulum Lab — Adjust length, mass, and damping. Period match challenge with three rounds. Real-time energy bar shows KE/PE split. Trail rendering shows the path.

Hooke's Law Lab — Spring simulation with phase-space plot and energy bar chart. Challenge mode asks you to hit target displacements. The phase-space view reveals the characteristic ellipse immediately.

Waves and Sound

Ripple Tank — Add up to four wave sources and watch interference patterns form. Analysis overlay shows constructive (green) and destructive (red) zones. Presets for double slit, triangle, and square arrangements.

Wave on a String — Traveling waves, standing waves, and free-end modes. The resonance detector glows when you hit a harmonic frequency.

Tone Generator — Real Web Audio API, real waveforms on a canvas oscilloscope. Sine, square, triangle, sawtooth. Log-scale 20–20,000 Hz slider. Note detection with cents deviation and a beat-frequency mode.

Sound Intensity — Inverse square law visualized. Change the source (whisper to jet engine) and distance, see the dB level update, and check against OSHA safe exposure limits.

Light and Optics

Bending Light — Full ray tracer: Snell's law, total internal reflection, prism dispersion into R/G/B sub-rays. Fan of 1–11 rays. Five challenge levels.

Geometric Optics — Thin lens equation with draggable object and focal points. Three principal rays colored distinctly. Covers real/virtual images, magnification, and six classic scenarios.

Reflection and Refraction — Incident, reflected, and refracted rays at an interface. Fresnel reflectance, critical angle visualization, TIR detection. All angles labeled with arc overlays.

Color Vision — Additive RGB mixing with real blend-mode simulation. Spectrum picker, color blindness simulator (Protanopia, Deuteranopia, Tritanopia), and subtractive CMY mixing.

Atomic and Nuclear

Build an Atom — Place protons, neutrons, and electrons. Elements 1–20 plus Fe, Cu, Ag, Au, Pb, U. Mini periodic table highlights the current element.

Nuclear Decay — 10×10 grid of atoms decaying in real time. Per-atom probabilistic decay using P = 1 − e^(−λΔt). Compare actual vs theoretical on an SVG graph. Five isotopes with wildly different half-lives.

Rutherford Scattering — Watch alpha particles curve around a gold nucleus. Color-coded trails by deflection angle. Side-by-side comparison of Thomson's plum pudding model and Rutherford's nuclear model.

Nuclear Fission — Chain reaction simulation with moderator blocks, control rods, and a k-effective meter. See the reactor go subcritical, critical, and supercritical.

Space and Gravity

Gravity Force Lab — Two draggable masses, log-scale sliders, real F = Gm₁m₂/r² calculations. Inverse square law bar chart at 1r/2r/3r/4r. Presets for Moon, Earth, Jupiter, and Sun.

Orbit Simulator — Click and drag to launch a satellite. RK4 integration for stable orbits. Live readout: eccentricity, period, apoapsis, periapsis. Rescue mission mode.

Planetary System — N-body gravity with Velocity Verlet integration. Four presets: Solar System, Binary Stars, Figure-8 (the Chenciner-Montgomery solution), Chaotic. Collision merging with momentum conservation.

Black Hole Explorer — Gravitational lensing, accretion disk, photon sphere, ISCO ring, ergosphere. Move your spacecraft toward the Schwarzschild radius and watch time dilation slow to a halt. Spaghettification mode, Hawking radiation visualization.

Chemistry

Element Match — Match elements to symbols and atomic numbers. Good warm-up before any chemistry session.

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All 29 games are free and run entirely in your browser — no download, no account. They work on mobile too (most have on-screen controls as fallbacks).

The best way to explore is to just open the games hub and click on whatever looks interesting. Or if you want something structured, try the Science Challenges for guided problems with XP rewards.