How do we make sense of the universe?

Mark Levinson’s The Universe in a Grain of Sand (2024) stems from one of the most fascinating questions that has been asked throughout human history: how do we make sense of the world we live in? The documentary combines the scientific explanations from IBM researchers, technological historians, computer scientists, and more with the works of artists in all fields ranging from sculptors, experimental filmmakers, and even famous painters such as Van Gogh or Picasso. The small selection of extraordinary individuals in this film represent the expansive amount of human contribution to answering the question of what our place in this world is, and how to understand how journey in this universe. It truly puts the viewer through an existential crisis of sorts, but reminds them of their capacity to learn.

Levinson takes science and art, two fields notoriously different from one another, and argues for their necessity to collaborate. Without science, we cannot create memory banks to capture human progress, and create tools to better our society and our intrinsic curiosity of the world. Without art, we cannot capture the deeply human emotions that we feel and express that to others, and connect in ways that even the most advanced quantum computers can try. The artists featured in this film would likely never have guessed their work to be shown alongside explanations of complicated physics, but it is quite beautiful to remember that art can never mean one thing, and the meaning of the universe has no one answer. As said in the film, who would have thought that the sands of the deserts thousands of years ago could have brought up to the world we live in today?