[HN Gopher] Road to reality - executable essay ___________________________________________________________________ Road to reality - executable essay Author : sritchie Score : 43 points Date : 2023-05-19 18:59 UTC (4 hours ago) (HTM) web link (reality.mentat.org) (TXT) w3m dump (reality.mentat.org) | AdamH12113 wrote: | Unrelated, but following one of the footnotes led me to this | interesting page on using color to visualize four-dimensional | movement. It uses untying knots as an example. It's a small | thing, but it worked well for me and made the concept of a Klein | bottle much more clear: | | http://www.rdrop.com/~half/Creations/Puzzles/visualizing.4D/... | Syntonicles wrote: | Excellent, I'm looking forward to future installments! I can't | tell whether the series will be related to the book of the same | title, but I would personally love a Lispy / SICP style | exploration into that. | esafak wrote: | The presentation is great, Sam. | | Does anyone have a list of similar presentation tools? I am | trying to pick a solution for technical, interactive blog posts, | so it has to support interactive visualizations, equations, and | have great typography. Live editing and support for running code | would be a great plus. | | I think of Observable, distill.pub, and Jupyter, and they all hit | various points but not all of them. | killthebuddha wrote: | It feels a little bit odd that a newsletter + project that's | directly motivated by Penrose's book and also appropriates the | book's title does not mention the book. For example, the GitHub | repo's readme: Welcome to the Road to Reality! | The Road to Reality is an essay series by me, Sam Ritchie. | Starting with the basics of Lisp (the Clojure programming | language, specifically), we'll build a modern computer | algebra system and use that system to explore and simulate | gems of modern physics like variational mechanics and general | relativity. | | Maybe it's just me, but I think if I was Roger Penrose I'd be | like "uh, wtf". | Jun8 wrote: | OP's substack linked in the post | (https://roadtoreality.substack.com/) was easier to read and | understand the motivation for this project. From the title I | assumed this would be a course that would take you through | Penrose's TRTR but interestingly it's not mentioned. I would love | a detailed, crowd-sourced TRTR companion site with comments and | explanations. | | I'm of two minds about using a programmatic approach to teach | mathematical physics. On the one hand, it empowers you to | experiment which is easier to do compared to pencil and paper. | OTOH, it adds another degree of removal from concepts that are | already hard. I would vote for a hybrid approach, where the | concepts are mastered the usual way but then computer models are | used to experiment beyond for additional insight and aha moments. | sritchie wrote: | I think you make a great point about adding even further | abstraction. I was inspired by Michael Nielsen's idea of | "Discovery Fiction"[0], and porting the Sussman library gave me | the idea that building the abstraction layers required to to do | the physics in "Structure and Interpretation of Classical | Mechanics" would make for a great narrative backbone. | | I DID start the newsletter thinking I would read Road to | Reality and get a community going around the book, and I still | want to do that! What happened there was when I tried to talk | about the book to anyone that wasn't already dialed on the math | I was learning (close family, my wife, software engineer | friends) I found that I couldn't communicate what I thought was | so beautiful about the book and Penrose's development. | | I wanted interactive visualizations that could run in the | browser to function as little set pieces, so I could set them | down and say | | - look, this is what I mean!, and | | - Here, you take the controls, let's play! | | TRTR will come in, mixed in, I hope, with executable Feynman | Lectures etc... | | Hopefully that helps fill in some context that I left out! | | [0]https://michaelnotebook.com/df/index.html | Jun8 wrote: | Thanks for the additional comments. I love (but cannot | understand 95%) Road to Reality and would love to have a | community around the book, so super excited about any such | effort. | abecedarius wrote: | Your project sounds really cool. From the title though I came | in expecting some connection to the Penrose book, and then | increasingly wondering if there is one or not -- it'd help to | get that question out of the way right away. | sritchie wrote: | This is great feedback, and of course you're right. I'll | flesh out the index and make sure this is clear right away. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2023-05-19 23:00 UTC)