Aetherwisp - Aetherwisp

Welcome to Aetherwisp! This is a scientific outreach project that provides free and open educational material in science. The specialization and difficulty of the material is intended to be on the level of university textbooks and is thus suitable for university studies or as a reference by more advanced professionals. It is a large corpus of work currently totaling over 300,000 words across hundreds of pages, organized by topic, covering an expanding number of scientific fields. Use the navigation menu on the left to explore the project.

About the project#

Aetherwisp is openly inspired by Wikipedia. It distinguishes itself because, where Wikipedia wants to read like an encyclopedia, Aetherwisp wants to read like a textbook. The difference is that an encyclopedia focuses on sharing knowledge in a comprehensive, digestible and accessible manner, at the cost of depth and rigor. A textbook is, in a sense, the opposite. Textbooks are much more difficult, but they go into much greater depth and can afford to be rigorous and technical. As such, you trade accessibility for correctness and depth. Wikipedia is often regarded as a questionable source of information, in part due to its open contribution philosophy. While we do not believe that that is inherently wrong (in fact, the openness of Wikipedia is its greatest strength), we recognize it has its weaknesses. Aetherwisp aims to rectify some of those weaknesses, namely trustworthiness and correctness, even if it makes the content out-of-reach for most readers. To put it simply: you read Wikipedia because you're curious; you read Aetherwisp because you want to study.

As a reflection of these principles, Aetherwisp content should ideally prove anything it claims. Unfortunately, this is not truly feasible outside of mathematics (and some closely related subjects) where the theorem-proof methodology holds well, but it is nevertheless a guiding principle. Wherever possible, trust should derive from proof, not authority.

A note about the content

Aetherwisp was born as a simple publication of student notes on university lectures and textbooks, largely regarding physics. As such, the current state of Aetherwisp is in great need of fact-checking, peer-reviewing and fixing of the (probably numerous) mistakes all-throughout. As such, take what you read here with a big grain of salt! Effort was put into trying to prove statements from earlier principles and to write understandable text that doesn't bog itself down with excessively formal language and tone. Nevertheless, be careful of what you read.

The project is currently in a transitional state from a repository of largely-unreviewed student material into a more formal, reliable source of information. Most importantly, the project wants to expand to allow contributions from multiple selected authors that can write, edit and review specific parts of the project that they have expertise in. This would also allow extending Aetherwisp outside of its current only domain: physics.

Questions#

What's the motivation for this project?

I am an open source and open science activist. That should be enough to answer the question, but if it isn't, here's the more in-depth version.

I do not believe it is a stretch to say that progress fundamentally relies on collaboration and inspection of others' work. The word "progress" itself implies that something is advancing from an existing point. Thus, when you obfuscate and deny access to existing work, yet still expect people to solve problems, people will just naturally find a way to get access to that work anyway, because that's how progress works. In so doing you get piracy, reverse engineering, binary decompilation... and if you try to deny these more, you get, well, better piracy, better reverse engineering, better binary decompilation... It's obvious, in a sense, because you can't progress from a work that you don't have access to. How could a scientist improve a theory they can't read? An engineer improve a tool they don't have the blueprint for? A programmer improve a software they don't have the code for? It's nonsense at a logical level, even before getting to the concrete aspects. That's why you get situations like arXiv suddenly restructuring half of the scientific publication pipeline as people realize that, actually, you don't need to pay €38 for an 8-page PDF (yes, arXiv preprints are not peer-reviewed, but if the paper does get peer-reviewed and put into a reputable journal, you can still access the old preprint for free, so the monetary argument still applies).

Aetherwisp, in a sense, is like a weird lovechild between the arXiv and Wikipedia models, just instead of targeting papers or encyclopedias, it targets textbooks. On one hand, you lose the authoritative trust of a textbook. On the other hand, you get... arguably everything else? It is free, open, natively digital, natively collaborative, much faster to update and not owned by any particular individual. Whether these justify the loss of trust is up to the individual to decide. Because of this, the contribution model for Aetherwisp content is intended to be placed under great scrutiny to guarantee a high minimum degree of quality, trustworthiness and accountability, while still encouraging agile, hassle-free contribution.

With this, Aetherwisp can occupy a niche that is currently undersupported: that of free and open mid-level information. Wikipedia covers the accessible, simpler information. arXiv covers the highly specialized, but very inaccessible information. Aetherwisp should cover the middle ground: technical learning material that's solid and rigorous, but not so specialized to be relevant only to researchers; in other words, what you'd find in university textbooks.

Why is it called Aetherwisp?

I maintain a repository of programming projects on simulations and games called WISP (which stands for "the World Is a Simulation, Probably"). I liked the sound of "wisp", so I figured I would use the same word as the basis of this project too. Wisps (or will-o'-wisps) are, throughout European folklore, ethereal bodies of light associated with many things depending on which part of Europe you're looking at. So, brainstorming some names with "wisp" in it, I encountered the word "aether" and I quite liked it. But then I realized that wisps are light and the word "aether" used to be associated with the "luminiferous aether", the medium through which light was thought to propagate through (before photons were discovered). Put the two together and you get Aetherwisp. It's a bit of a subtle nod at the physics origins of this project, plus it's memorable.

How can I contribute?

Great question! The answer is still pending though. The contribution process is possibly the most critical and sensitive part of Aetherwisp, so it is not finalized yet. As such, no contributions are accepted until a decision is made on how they should be handled. Formalizing the contribution process, specifically who is allowed to contribute what, ultimately determines how much you can trust what's written in this project.

As an overview of the current model, contribution would be limited to only verified collaborators with enough expertise in a subject to make trustworthy statements about it. These collaborators would have complete access only to the parts of the project that within their domain. Modification of content in a domain outside the scope of a collaborator requires review and permission from at least one collaborator responsible for that domain. For example, if a collaborator responsible for the Material physics section wanted to add/edit/delete a page in Material physics, they could just do it. If they wanted to add/edit/delete a page in the Quantum field theory section, they'd need permission by someone responsible for Quantum field theory. Non-collaborators (i.e., readers) may also suggest changes, but they always need approval regardless of what is being changed. This is useful for two reasons: spotting trivial errors like typos, grammar mistakes, bad phrasing and so forth, which anyone can do; and for contributions by people who have expertise (professors, researchers, industry professionals...) and want to help, but don't have the time or interest to become full collaborators. In this case, the contributor should probably specify their credentials to help prioritize reviewing (although contributions should be evaluated based only on whether they are correct or incorrect, not the credentials of the writer).

A standard style guide should also be made to keep formatting and tone consistent across the project (although individual differences in writing styles between collaborators are obviously always going to be present).