Welcome to Aetherwisp! This is a scientific outreach project that tries to provide free and open educational material in science. It is a large corpus of work totaling over 350,000 words, organized by field and topic, covering an ever-expanding number of fields.
Aetherwisp is greatly inspired by Wikipedia, but where Wikipedia reads like an encyclopedia, Aetherwisp reads like a textbook. The purpose isn't to share knowledge, but to teach science. If the difference doesn't click right away, then don't worry: it's all about "knowing" versus "understanding". Whereas an encyclopedia is a compendium of factual information, a textbook is a collection of methods, techniques and proofs to reach and understand of that information. Aetherwisp therefore focuses on showing why rather than what and attempts to provide a rigorous and verifiable scientific background to its statements.
Because of this mentality, much of the content here is likely to be inaccessible to many readers. Articles implicitly expect the reader to have enough background knowledge to understand a proper treatment of the topic. Although being rigorous requires a lot of effort on both the writer and the reader, I believe it is a necessary part of establishing a relationship of trust in science and providing actual proof, instead of accepting facts based on authority.
As it stands, Aetherwisp is primarily about physics and associated math. Further topics in the future will likely be about scientific computing, HPC and other branches of mathematics.
The quality of the writing in Aetherwisp has improved greatly over time, with more recent additions being much more complete, nicer to read and better formatted. This does however mean that I consider older articles to be subpar compared to current standards and are not representative of the current state of the project. Some older sections have been rewritten, but several remain in their original state from when Aetherwisp wasn't even a consideration. For similar reasons, some sections are still written in Italian. These will be translated eventually.
About the author
Hi! I am Samuele Vignoli, currently a physics student at the University of Trieste. Before this project even had a name, it was originally born as just a way to share my notes with other students and help people with their studies. Eventually, ambition kicked in and decided that it was the right platform to turn it into something more, so in the spirit of open source and open science, I put it on the public internet. I've grown weary of the rampant and frankly predatory monetization of academia and figured I would do my part in opposing a system I believe is antithetical to science. My website Liminal Theater has more on me if you're curious, and my Github profile has all the code that I write.
FAQ
Q. What do you use to write and publish these?
A. These notes are all written in Obsidian. I use the latex-suite plugin to make writing LaTeX 100 times faster, which is what allows me to write in real time during lectures and not spend ages just typesetting math. I make plots and diagrams with obsidian-excalidraw when they are not taken from other sources like Wikipedia. These notes are then turned into a website with my personal wiki-generator Obsidian plugin. The website itself is hosted on Vercel. The Obsidian vault that contains this entire project is also publicly available on GitHub here.
Q. Why is it called Aetherwisp?
A. I maintain a repository of programming projects on simulations and games called WISP (stands for "the World Is a Simulation, Probably"). Since these projects are to an extent intertwined and since I like the sound of "wisp", I figured I would use the word as the basis of this project too. Wisps (a.k.a. will-o'-wisps) are ethereal bodies of light found throughout European folklore, so what better medium for these to be in than the (luminiferous) aether? Put the two together and you get Aetherwisp. It checks all the boxes: physics? Check. Fantasy and mythology? Check. Etymology? Check. Sounds good to the ear? Check.
Q. I found a mistake!
A. In a project this large there's bound to be many. The preferred way to notify me is to open an issue on GitHub since that keeps things nice and organized. If for some reason you can't use GitHub, you can send an email to samvignoli@proton.me with [Aetherwisp] in the subject, but prefer GitHub if you can.
Q. I found broken formatting!
A. These notes are converted into a website from plain Markdown text. While I've ironed out a lot of bugs, there's bound to be more in the process, some of which I might already be aware of. I try to fix them when I can. As above, you can open an issue on GitHub.
Q. Where are the sources?
A. Some recent sections have a page containing books and websites I referenced while writing, but most don't. I'll try to add them in the future. Either way, I try to always prove what's written in Aetherwisp from previous results, so that results are based on proof and not authority (to the extent that is possible).