Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics (2015)

http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/gjs/6946/sicm-html/book-Z-H-4.html#%25_chap_Temp_2

by xeonmc • 2 years ago

40 12 2 years ago

groups.csail.mit.edu

``In almost all textbooks, even the best, this principle is presented so that it is impossible to understand.'' (K. Jacobi, Lectures on Dynamics, 1842-1843). I have not chosen to break with tradition. V. I. Arnold, Mathematical Methods of Classical Mechanics [5], footnote, p. 246

It's funny that this quote is not ironic at all, and in fact the authors of SICM include it because they agree with the assessment (by Arnold of his own textbook and its predecessors).

The SICM authors do indeed break with that tradition.

nanomonkey2• 2 years ago

For years I've tried to get a reading group together for this book. But of all my friend's in the Bay Area, I am the only one that enjoys LISP/Scheme and Physics.

Happy Tau day!

perihelions• 2 years ago

Oh wow, that be the coolest thing ever to have a reading group for this book, which is also at the intersection of multiple of my interests, and I've had my eye on it for years. I want to learn classical mechanics at a much deeper conceptual level, and I want to absorb new, powerful uses of Lisp abstraction, and writing toy physics simulations is of course always fun. I have so many bits and pieces of weekend projects that sort-of lead into SICM, and things like it. Sadly, I'm temporarily on the wrong continent for Bay Area meetup groups. (Maybe this is an error state).

I hope you serendipitously manage to find your ideal reading group, nanomonkey.

alexshendi• 2 years ago

I once joined a Clojure group for reading SICM. But then the discussion turned out to be more about porting the stuff to Clojure than physics.

nanomonkey2• 2 years ago

I was likely in the same group, we only got through the first chapter or so before it devolved into what graphical library we'd be using...

...so shall we port it to Guile Scheme then?!?

blagie• 2 years ago

Secret of this book:

The physics is interesting, but SCMUTILS is more interesting. You can:

(1) Write a function

(2) Symbolically compute it's derivative

(3) Render the derivative with LaTeX

(4) Compile the derivative into native code

(5) Integrate out motion using an efficient numerical algorithm

.... all in clean, elegant Scheme. THAT toolset, you can take with you to any domain.

Qem• 2 years ago

What are the prerequisites for this book?

thisrod2• 2 years ago

I've finally gotten around to reading SICM, but I can't get MIT Scheme to install on the current OSX 14.2. Autoconf requires an old version of the OSX SDK. Has someone else already solved that problem?

I was surprised by how many ways Sussman and Wisdom found to modernise the Landau and Lipshitz treatment. There is the obvious change, where the first time they solve some equations of motion, it's done numerically, and the solution is chaotic.

There is also a more subtle change, where they keep sneaking in the concepts of differential geometry. The word "manifold" is reserved for a footnote, but if you know what tangent spaces and sprays are, it's straightforward to translate the "local tuples" and see what they're actually talking about.

I think this is a good idea. If physics undergraduates were exposed to manifolds and tangent spaces in their analytical mechanics course, then saw some exterior calculus in their first electromagnetism course, they might be ready for curvature and geodesics when they study general relativity.

i_don_t_know• 2 years ago

I don't know if this is useful to you. I haven't tried to install MIT Scheme directly on macOS. Instead, I'm using the sample project at [1] to run a linux VM with Fedora on macOS x86-64. I was able to install MIT Scheme and scmutils on the VM by following the instructions at [2][3][4][5] for CentOS. It appears to have succeeded but I haven't really worked with the system yet.

I haven't tried the instructions for ARM-based macOS at [6] because I'm still on Intel.

It's less convenient to run a VM than to run on macOS directly. But I prefer to sandbox "random" software that way, and some things support linux better than macOS.

[1] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/virtualization/run...

[2] http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/gjs/6946/

[3] http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/gjs/6946/installation....

[4] http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/gjs/6946/mechanics-sys...

[5] https://www.gnu.org/software/mit-scheme/documentation/stable...

[6] http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/gjs/6946/mechanics-sys...

(You have to install texinfo for the online documentation part of [5]. Skip the 'install-pdf' documentation target if you don't want to depend on tex/latex.)

westurner• 2 years ago

Does `brew install mit-scheme` work? The homebrew formula says : https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/blob/8c0bb91eea9c8... :

  # Does not build: https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?64611
  deprecate! date: "2023-11-20", because: :does_not_build

Podman runs Linux containers in a VM in QEMU on MacOS. https://podman.io/docs/installation

hnarayanan• 2 years ago

Here you go :)

https://github.com/hnarayanan/sicm

thisrod2• 2 years ago

Thanks!

Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics (2015)

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