The Universe in a Grain of Sand

“This art-film crossed with creative documentary takes us on a journey from experimental film to the frontiers of quantum computing.” – CineGlobe

Synopsis

How do we make sense of the world around us?
The Universe in a Grain of Sand is a meditation by the award-winning filmmaker/physicist Mark Levinson (Particle Fever) on how both scientists and artists use their understanding of nature to create tools and representations to probe the deepest mysteries of the universe. Juxtaposing scientific developments with the works of over forty artists, the visually rich film traces a journey towards a unity of nature, humans and machines.

Filmmaker

Mark Levinson is the award-winning director of the documentary feature Particle Fever. The film won the inaugural Stephen Hawking Medal for Science Communication and the National Academies of Science Communication Award. Before embarking on his film career, Mark earned a PhD in theoretical physics. In the film world, he first became a specialist in sound editing, working on over 40 feature films, including The English Patient and The Talented Mr. Ripley. He is the director of the fiction film Prisoner of Time, and the hybrid film, The Bit Player. He is currently adapting Richard Powers’s award-winning novel, The Gold Bug Variations, into a feature film.

Scientists

Dario Gil

Director of IBM Research

“Sometimes you need to come up with new and completely different ways to look at nature, to discover what you couldn't see before.”

George Dyson

Historian of Technology

“I'm a great believer in the ingenuity of the human mind in being able to look at nature and adopt it and learn from nature, because nature's been doing this much longer than we have.”

Talia Gershon

Materials Scientist, IBM Research

“Quantum mechanics gives you access to different properties that materials also have. You use these properties of these materials to actually compute in a totally different way. It's not like you're doing the exact same thing but faster on a quantum machine. You have to completely reimagine the problem.”

Luis Ceze

Computer Scientist, University of Washington

“A lot of people today are thinking about allowing computers to make mistakes and errors in a calculated way, because in the case of nature, those mistakes are important to make future versions of itself better.”

David Cox

Director of MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab

“There are at least two ways that neuroscience and computer science can inform and inspire each other. So, one thing we could do is to look to the brain for inspiration on how we should build the hardware. The other thing we can do is take inspiration from the analog operation of the brain and ask, can we do those same computations, but with zeros and ones, with an abstract mathematical representation of neurons?”

Sarah Schwettmann

Computational Neuroscientist, MIT

“A lot of approaches to integrating art and science sit firmly in one camp and look to the other and ask, “what there might inspire, how we do science,” or “what scientific knowledge might inspire how we do art.” But I think there's another very interesting approach that instead asks, “what underlying questions motivate both of these disparate fields?” And some of those questions concern the fundamental nature of the human relationship to the world.”