The Road to Reality

What Hacker News says

1. jonathanstrangeOct 2026
   "Let's be honest": Why would I care that you care so much that these problems were solved automatically when you yourself don't even seem to be aiming at a better understanding and talk in disrespectful ways about the people who seek a deeper understanding? You could read a book about the history of mathematics, for example Roger Penrose's Road to Reality.
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2. QuadmasterXLIIJan 2026
   Roger Penrose’s (Yes that Penrose) Road to Reality is excellent. Be warned the first 382 pages are just building the mathematical foundation he needs for the second half. But if you don’t do this, you can’t really write a book about modern physics targeting undergrad math.
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3. senorcrabJan 2026
   Freshman university textbooks have what you need. Two of the most popular are:

   - University Physics by Young and Freedman

   - Fundamentals of Physics by Halliday, Resnick, Walker

   - Modern Physics by Krane

   You might guess that real physics is not actually in freshman textbooks, and you are right. Modern physics requires rigorous mathematics.

   For a nonrigorous introduction/overview:

   - The Road to Reality by Roger Penrose

   If you want to actually learn almost all of physics at a high level:

   - Course of Theoretical Physics by Landau

   Note that Landau is extremely difficult.

   If you want to learn the math needed for modern physics (topology) in the context of physics, nonrigorously:

   - Geometry, Topology, and Physics by Nakahara

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4. markstockMar 2025
   Here's one that starts with the concept of a straight line and builds all the way to string theory. It's a monumental book, and it still challenges me. Roger Penrose's The Road To Reality.
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5. xtrapol8Oct 2024
   Sure, thanks for taking an honest curious interest. I actually posted a new HN entry which was removed (not “dead”, not “flagged”.) after this entry, I will post the contents of that and you can take what you will from it.

   Potential - the great mystery, I’m pretty sure if I nail this I will solve “the grand unified field theory” and/or the “unified theory of everything” though don’t cringe, I think I’m on to something. EVERYTHING is potential. Existential existence is potential. Information is potential. Hungry? An orange is potential for the equilibrium of your hunger.

   Whatever light is may be tied in a knot and that is the basis of all matter. Potential is state unresolved. When QM theorists describe the super amplitude which resolves through interference, that super amplitude is universal potential. This gives rise to state. State is NOT the fundamental aspect. There is no smallest particle building up to the universe, there is potential subdividing into smaller particles through resolve. That is potential.

   Negative potential is another way of saying wherever potential is not. Like an ion is missing an electron. The negative potential attracts the electron of another. A different way of saying this is “potential distributes to equilibrium” though “negative potential” is technically more descriptive. Heat moves towards lower heat, only technically if heat is at equilibrium everything is still moving wherever the math shows a gap sufficiently for the thermal flux to vibrate (negative potential still exists at thermal equilibrium).

   Check out Roger Penrose’s Road to Reality, he devotes chapters to manifold surface areas. Essentially three dimensional space is not honest. Space-time actually has hyper-dimensional curvature (accretion and planetary ecliptics for instance show how spacial distribution forms an axis)

   Let’s talk about electricity. Voltage is literally defined as the potential (negative and positive), where an abundance of electron excitation may be closed in a circuit. Entropy is the fundamental force that causes the electrons (the negative is actually the “positive potential”) to rush to the positive side (which is technically the negative potential, don’t blame me lots have noticed this oddity over the century.) if you add resistance, this turns into heat, slowing the entropic property of voltage equilibrium down. This heat could be insulated, which would slow its dissipation (that talk of entropy may be slowed through resistance.) Heat is not entropy, however heat is the final exhaust of all work, making it the obvious measure (thus the laws of thermodynamics.)

   Seeing things this way teach us something important which unifies our understanding of “entropy” in both physics and information theory.

   For information, toss a handful of marbles (packed and “ordered” by your grip) into the air and entropy will cause them to spread spacially along the “manifold” of the force arc of your toss.

   I will post an additional comment with the content of my HN post which was censored. It didn’t include all the explanations, though I worded my whole point more carefully. Thanks again for being more curious than anti-karmic, this one gave me a beating!

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6. illuminantSep 2024
   Entropy is the existential phenomenon by which potential (any kind: heat, electromagnetic, and informational/structural) distributes over negative potential.

   Math and physics geeks will turn beat red and say that entropy is a "scalar value [in their equations] of the distribution of delta probability." This, such as inverse square or whatever appropriate for the relevant manifold surface area (check out Penrose's Road to Reality for an excellent tutorial of manifold distributions.)

   Conventional students will say "entropy is the waste energy that cannot be used or reclaimed" which sounds good in class yet doesn't fit in reality. Ambient heat is the entropy of whatever generated it, and we all enjoy ambient heat.

   Everyone else is stuck in a mystical uncertainty (which is a laugh for uncertainty is a synonym for entropy.)

   Where is it? Probably any location within the area of distribution.

   What is it? Probably whatever there is, in statistical proportion.

   In casual terms, any time anyone mentions "uncertainty" they're talking about the entropic distribution of potentials.

   Thermal equilibrium is merely the most primitive universal example (everything is moving from more potential to less, and heat is the final exhaust of all working processes.

   Entropy is the distribution of potential over negative potential, in every valid usage.

   The mistake Shannon made in his monumental instigation of this very subject, that equation that expresses the electron distribution upon the valence of an atom, didn't account for the valence changing energy states. This giving modern information theory the erroneous conclusion that entropy is the "available states in a system" when in fact entropic measure is of all possible states, even those not fitting the model (a human construction.)

   Other than all of this, the book looks quite interesting!

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