HN Reader

Funny that we call it classical. Newton wouldn't have called it so. Maybe we should categorize sciences based on the spatial scale at which they operate.A specific scale might define a world that has it's logic system, purpose, reasoning etc. For example, quantum scale, human scale and cosmic scales have their own physics, logic and causality.

What software they used to create this wonderful book?

I've often dreamed of a "Structure and interpretation" series of books.

Scheme is pretty close to a universal computation substrate that provides enough ergonomics to be human understandable and writing anything out in it provides genuine illumination to what's going on under the hood.

The "little" books are a tease of what that series could be.

I didn't get anywhere trying to read this book. Then I watched a youtube video about calculus of variations and suddenly Lagrangian dynamics made total sense to me. I should probably try reading the book again.

Does anyone know a text which justifies why the Lagrangian approach works? This text and many others I have encountered just start with the Principle of Least Action taken as given and go from there but I'm left wondering why we define the Action as this object and why we should expect it to be minimised for the physical trajectory in the first place.

Failing a full derivation from the ground up, a proof of the equivalence to Newtonian mechanics would be interesting.

There’s also Functional Differential Geometry by the same Sussman and Wisdom:

https://mitp-content-server.mit.edu/books/content/sectbyfn/b...

Does anybody know of a way to run the code in this book? I've tried a couple of times but never quite succeeded.