I'm always surprised more people don't know about Quanta. Seems like it's currently the best science journalism out there, and IMO a very strong candidate for the single best place on the internet that's not crowd-sourced. The mixture of original art and technical diagrams is outstanding. Podcast is pretty good too, but I do wish they'd expand it to have someone with a good voice reading all the articles.

Besides not treating readers like idiots, they take themselves seriously, hire smart people, tell good stories but aren't afraid to stay technical, and simply skip all the clickbait garbage. Right now from the Scientific American front page: "Type 1 Diabetes science is having a moment". Or from Nature: "'Biotech Barbie' says ..". Granted I cherry-picked these offensive headlines pandering to facebook/twitter from many other options that might be legitimately interesting reads, but on Quanta there's also no paywalls, no cookie pop-ups, no thinly-veiled political rage-baiting either

It's because of their Simons Foundation support, but not only because of that. I mean, I invite anyone to name another billionaire pet project of comparable quality.

Carnegie Libraries, Nobel Prizes, Rhodes scholarships?

Clay Mathematics Institute, with its 7 Millennium problems

Good one!

Stanford & Carnegie Mellon universities...

Mathematica?

Good game and a hard question, especially if you make "comparable" more explicit. I'd add "noncommercial, open-access", and "modern" in the sense that it happened under the current norms with respect to legacy and the social contract.

Clay Mathematics Institute, with its 7 Millennium problems

I like what MacKenzie Scott is doing in the space of "What it takes to actually spend down billions of dollars"

I agree. I find their articles very enjoyable. And even though they stay technical, they don’t descend into becoming a technical journal. The content is still accessible to a non-expert like me.

Quanta’s greatest strength is that it doesn’t pretend to be clever. Many tech publications write as if they’re showing off, and you just end up feeling tired after reading them.

> Many tech publications write as if they’re showing off, and you just end up feeling tired after reading them.

I like this honestly because this shows that I learned something intelligent. On the other hand, if I don't feel exhausted after reading, it is a strong sign that the article was below my intellectual capacity, i.e. I would have loved it if I could have learned more.

Seems superficial. If a simple concept is presented in a complex way what did you actually learn?

Often, if the concept is presented in a more complex way the reason is that the author wants to emphasize and explain how the concept relates in a non-trivial way to some other deep concept; thus you learn a lot more than when the author explains things in the most simple (and shallow) way.

IMO the most common reason why something is presented in a more complex way is that it is badly explained.

Of course, most common or not, each case is different.

Also speaks to a lack of understanding on the author's part; people who truly understand some subject are generally much more adept at explaining it in simpler terms – ie without adding complexity beyond the subject's essential complexity

I don’t see how that is beneficial. If a simple concept relates to a complex one then explain the complexity, don’t add it.

> If a simple concept relates to a complex one then explain the complexity, don’t add it.

So write a text of at least 500 pages to explain the complexity. :-)

It's OK to keep going deeper into the material if you aren't tired yet.

Quanta is amazing because it doesn't have to worry about money. It's a publication run by the Simons Foundation, funded with the proceeds of the wildly successful RenTec hedge fund. So they get pretty much full editorial control.

For other publications they are beholden to people who haven't figured out ad-block, and your bar needs to be pretty low to capture that revenue.

Remarkably, they don't even ask for money anywhere on the site. Now that is a rare thing on the modern internet, especially for high quality writing.

And they have a RSS feed, although it's a bit tricky to figure out, since the relevant header tag for that is set up incorrectly, pointing to a useless empty "comments" feed even from their main page. The actual feed for articles is https://www.quantamagazine.org/feed/

Nice find, thank you. Your sleuthing is appreciated.

Oh dope. Added to my feedbin!

Agreed. I'm not a mathematician - and to me a manifold is more familar in the context of engines. But I found both the text and the diagrams very useful.

When you use the word "engine" on HN, it can be understood as many things that aren't what you think (e.g. game engines).

Is that really a good article? I thought it was average. It had some big flaws but was probably still informative for readers with no mathematical knowledge in the domain.

For instance, consider the only concrete example in the article: the space of all possible configurations of a double pendulum is a manifold. The author claims it's useful to see it in a manifold, but why? Precisely, why more as a manifold than as a square [O,2π[²?

I also expected more talk about atlases. In simple cases, it's easy to think of a surface as a deformation of a flat shape, so a natural idea is to think of having a map from the plan to the surface. But, even for a simple sphere, most surfaces can't map to a single flat part of the plan, and you need several maps. But how do you handle the parts where the maps overlap? What Riemmann did was defining properties on this relationship between manifold points and maps (which can be countless).

BTW, I know just enough about relativity to deny that "space-time [is] a four-dimensional manifold", at least a Riemmannian manifold. IIRC, the usual term is Minkowski-spacetime.

Spacetime is a four-dimensional manifold (at least theoretically - who knows what it is in reality). Technically it's a pseudo-Riemannian manifold since the metric is not positive definite: it can be negative or zero for non-zero vectors. A Riemannian manifold proper has a positive definite metric, but in popularizations like this I wouldn't really expect them to get into these kinds of distinctions.

> Precisely, why more as a manifold than as a square [O,2π[²?

Because, as the article explains, it's a torus (loop crossed with a loop), not a square (segment crossed with a segment).

Minkowski spacetime is the term in special relativity, i.e. the flat case, or zero curvature. In general relativity, spacetime is a pseudo Riemannian manifold, like the sibling comment says. Unlike Minkowski spacetime, it can be curved.

> Precisely, why more as a manifold than as a square

In a double pendulum, each arm can freely rotate (there is no stopping point). This means 0 degrees and 360 degrees are the same point, so the edges of the square are actually joined. If you join the left and right edges to each other, then join the top and bottom edges to each other, you end up with a torus.

> BTW, I know just enough about relativity

Unfortunately this is one of those things where that knowledge is not enough.

The GR model of spacetime is that it is locally Minkowski but globally a manifold of Minkowski patches.