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".
It's not just you! The last thing I want is a WTF from Penrose...
This was just an oversight from me trying to cram in too much writing, and I'll fix it tonight once the kids are down. I explained the intended connection in a different comment — basically I started the newsletter with the goal of reading Penrose's book, doing all the exercises and trying to build out a community reading it together.
But my notes were just as confusing as the book, so I spent 3 years working on a port of Sussman's computer algebra system and sewing it together with this notebook engine, MathBox for 3D rendering, Mafs, Leva, MathLive, and JSXGraph and Reagent for a declarative way of sharing state between everyone.
Then I pieced it all together in this essay, tried to keep it concise, and blew it by not filling in the whole genesis story and GOAL of following Penrose.
I'll add that, and I will cover chapters of the book too!
Awesome! I similarly blew it by not mentioning that I think this is an awesome project. I bet tons of people have been similarly inspired by the book and by Penrose (I know I have) but you've actually gone out and done a thing, mad kudos to you!
