What am I up to here? I’m not exactly sure. A simple goal is to host my web creations somewhere convenient that I can share with people. But I also might entertain a greater ambition with this metaproject, which is to create a kind of math and science museum on the web which inspires curiosity and exploration and is accesible to anyone with a computer and an internet connection.
The online world of science education and outreach is already vast, with most of it happening on youtube. There are many excellent videos, but the medium lacks the interactive quality that a webapp can acheive. I think it’s very hard to watch a video or even a lecture and take away something meaningful. It’s the reason we assign problem sets. I strive to create things that inspire questions, and give the means to explore those questions in the simulation. They’re (mostly) not just animations one watches, but instead little experiments that reveal their secrets only after you’ve played with them for a bit.
Most online science content is also rather basic, and I think many of the most interesting topics in physics and math are almost never been broached. I’m talking about the deep concepts that have affected how we scientists view the world. For example spontaneous symmetry breaking, or renormalization. I make simulations so that I can see these things in action for myself. Then I can help others to see what I’m looking for in the simulation. Ideally these experiments would be interesting to both a scientific researcher (like myself) and a layperson.
This is really more about inspiring than explaining, and for me it has an important aesthetic dimension. I remember browsing wikipedia as a teenager and becoming captivated by the language and symbols used to describe quantum field theory and the standard model. It doesn’t matter than I had no idea what it meant, because it inspired me to try to learn what they were talking about. There is a line between communicating effectively to laypeople, say by not spamming equations at them, and being so condescending as to not explain even what it is we’re really talking about.
What makes it a museum? I love museums, and enjoy thinking about what makes a museum interesting. The best museums tell a story. The galleries or exhibits are meant to be enjoyed in a certain (possibly branching) order where each piece gives you the context for the next one. Even better if the museum can anticipate or plant some question in the visitor’s mind before they move to the next piece. So I’m going to try to do that, organizing the projects into exhibits and telling little stories about them, and the deep concepts they represent.