Karol Jałochowski

A physicist, filmmaker, science journalist. He created the acclaimed documentary series Pioneers: At the Edge of Understanding and has collaborated with POLITYKA, Newsweek and Scientific American. His work bridges science, culture, and philosophy. Major documentary examples are listed below.

In Places Like This One
100 minutes, 2026
Imagine a planet reduced to brutal simplicity. No complexity, no grey area. Neurons never become minds, life forms never become societies. Welcome to Null. Karol Jałochowski invented this celestial body and invited leading European scientists, artists, and public figures to describe it as if it truly existed somewhere in the universe. The result is a surreal, largely improvised, deadpan documentary that blurs the boundary between reality and fiction while tracing the uneven process of exploring and understanding Null.

Ceci n'est pas SFI. A documentary about the Santa Fe Institute
94 minutes, 2024
Interdisciplinarity, multidisciplinarity, and transdisciplinarity are essential practices for confronting the global challenges of civilization. Yet they are not readily embraced within conventional academia. Interdisciplinary exchange enriches scientific knowledge and keeps intellectual inquiry alive and dynamic. The Santa Fe Institute, an independent research institution, fosters such exchange by bringing together humanists and natural scientists in search of bridges between their fields and methods. The film presents the Institute’s members and their experiences of this unique collaboration, rooted in a willingness to engage in mutual enrichment through diverse scientific perspectives.

Couldn't Care Less. Cormac McCarthy in conversation with David Krakauer
75 minutes, 2023
Cormac McCarthy spent the last 25 years of his life writing novels at the mountaintop retreat of the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, an institute dedicated to the formal analysis of complex systems. In this documentary, filmed in December 2017 in the SFI library, McCarthy reflects — in conversation with his colleague David Krakauer — on isolation, mathematics, character, and the nature of the unconscious.

Cormac McCarthy's Veer
40 minutes, 2022
“Why is the unconscious so loath to speak to us? Why the images, metaphors, pictures? Why the dreams, for that matter?” asked Cormac McCarthy in one of his most famous essays The Kekulé Problem. In this film, made at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico — an institute dedicated to the formal analysis of complex systems — he allows himself to expand on these ideas. A film, it should be added, that had his personal blessing.

Artur Ekert. A Model Kit
54 minutes, 2018
Artur Ekert (1961), a young maverick mathematician and physicist, invented a unique form of quantum cryptography in 1992. As a recipe for the perfect cipher, it also challenged common assumptions about the nature of free will and randomness. Despite decades of intensive research, the idea remains remarkably challenging and elusive — much like its inventor. This rare film presents Ekert in his ad hoc habitat: Singapore.

Charles H. Bennett. A Drinking Bird Mystery
62 minutes, 2018
Charles H. Bennett (1943) is an American thinker, physicist, and pioneer of information theory with astonishingly broad interests. He is best known for his research into the surprising interconnections between physics — especially quantum physics — and information. He is one of the founding fathers of quantum cryptography and a co-author of the revolutionary concept of quantum teleportation. But you can find that on the Internet.

Freeman Dyson. Space Dreamer
46 minutes, 2016
Freeman Dyson (1923–2020) was a legendary scientific figure whose influence extended across countless fields of knowledge. Without his extraordinary mathematical ability to see through things, science would look very different today. He was also known for his optimistically subversive views on many of the world’s central problems. As he explains, the world needs heretics to challenge prevailing orthodoxies. Dyson was involved in virtually all major nuclear disarmament initiatives and helped make the planet far safer than many had expected. He was also a lone but vocal advocate of long-term deep-space colonization — and of sailing to the moons of Jupiter, the subject of this film.

Daniel C. Dennett. Do Lobsters Have Free Will?
46 minutes, 2015
Daniel Dennett of Tufts University was one of the most important philosophers of mind of our time and a great reformer of the field. He was also the author of several hundred scientific papers and more than a dozen books. For nearly half a century, he searched for answers to fundamental questions: What is consciousness? What is free will? How does reality emerge and evolve? Is faith a natural phenomenon? What are the roots of irrationalism? This film documents a personal meeting with the philosopher at his home in northern New England.

Gregory Chaitin. Against Method
46 minutes, 2015
Gregory Chaitin is a mathematician and expert on complexity. Already as a young prodigy, he made major contributions to the philosophy of mathematics and computer science. Chaitin argues that there is no such thing as absolute certainty in mathematics: there are truths that cannot be proven and problems that are impossible to solve. For him, however, this is a reason for profound optimism. The creativity required to confront such difficulties is, he believes, no different from the creativity nature displays in its astonishing power of creation. For Chaitin, this analogy is no accident — and he seeks to demonstrate its validity mathematically.

Julian Barbour. Bottom’s Dream
47 minutes, 2015
Julian Barbour is an independent physicist affiliated with University of Oxford, a historian of science, and the author of numerous papers and several books. For more than thirty years, he has sought to remove what he considers unnecessary concepts from the toolbox of physics. One of them is time itself, which, according to Barbour, is an illusion — entirely unnecessary for a scientific description of the world. In recent years, he has been developing a theory explaining the origins of our sense of the passage of time and its directionality, both associated with this illusion. We meet Barbour at his home in a small village near Oxford, accompanying him through the routines of everyday life.

Reality Lost. How the Objective Reality Had to Go
58 minutes, 2013
When the 20th century began, a major shift took place in science. Scientists started conducting experiments with unprecedented precision — manipulating single particles, atoms, and electrons. And they became bewildered. Small objects appeared to possess strangely fuzzy properties. What is more, the very act of observing or measuring them seemed to bring them to life, extracting them from a vague and indeterminate domain. The equations of quantum mechanics were beautiful. They produced astonishingly accurate answers to mind-boggling questions about the exotic microworld. But there was a price to pay: objective reality seemed to vanish. Was it ever regained?