OP’s substack linked in the post (<a href="https://roadtoreality.substack.com/" rel="nofollow">https://roadtoreality.substack.com/</a>) 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.<p>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.
Sam, I've been loosely following your projects / SICMutils since I landed on your Road to Reality substack (incidentally, after getting a copy of Penrose's book in early 2020 with similar goals). It's been inspiring to see it coming together - congrats on getting this out into the world!<p>This presentation is super clean & this kind of executable & visualizable code/LaTeX/math is (IMO) absolutely the future. Math on paper sells Lagrange & Hamilton way short. I originally wasn't able to break through the Lispy-ness of Clojure when following early SICMUtils (was a little busy having transferred to Caltech for Physics in '21 :)), but am looking forward to getting back into it and a second round with Emmy following these posts.
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:<p><pre><code> 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.
</code></pre>
Maybe it's just me, but I think if I was Roger Penrose I'd be like "uh, wtf".
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:<p><a href="http://www.rdrop.com/~half/Creations/Puzzles/visualizing.4D/index.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.rdrop.com/~half/Creations/Puzzles/visualizing.4D/...</a>
Reminds me of Bret Victor and hundredrabbits. If Lisp was more popular, we could use it as building block for UI (since it can describe both code data). An email client where all of your emails is a (lazy) list? A Figma-like where you can compose, filter, reduce the graphical elements? Lists are everywhere, and Lisp is built for it.
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.
The presentation is great, Sam.<p>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.<p>I think of Observable, distill.pub, and Jupyter, and they all hit various points but not all of them.