Road to reality – executable essay
reality.mentat.org
Road to reality – executable essay
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Re: Road to reality – executable essay
#2OP’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.
Re: Road to reality – executable essay
#3Excellent, 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.
Re: Road to reality – executable essay
#4OP’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 teac…
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!
Re: Road to reality – executable essay
#5OP’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 teac…
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 a…
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.
Re: Road to reality – executable essay
#6Unrelated, 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/...
Re: Road to reality – executable essay
#7OP’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 teac…
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 a…
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.
Re: Road to reality – executable essay
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 a…
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.
This is great feedback, and of course you're right. I'll flesh out the index and make sure this is clear right away.
Re: Road to reality – executable essay
#9The 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.
Re: Road to reality – executable essay
#10It 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.