[HN Gopher] Road to reality - executable essay
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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.
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(page generated 2023-05-19 23:00 UTC)