Pocono conference by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
Followup to the Shelter Island Conference, this is where Julian Schwinger and Richard Feynman exposed their theories to explain the experiments of the previous conference.
Julian made a formal presentation that took until the afternoon and bored everyone to death, though the mathematics avoided much questioning.
Feynman then presented his revolutionary approach, which he was unable to prove basic properties of, but which gave correct results, and people were not very happy.
Physicist by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
Figure 1.
xkcd 435: Fields arranged by purity
. Source.
Abraham Pais by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
This due is a beast, he knows both the physics and the history of physics, and has the patience to teach it. What a blessing: Section "How to teach and learn physics".
Alain Aspect by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
Figure 1.
Alain Aspect in 2016
. Source.
Video 1.
Alain Aspect in Quantum entanglement Documentary (1985)
Source. The moustache and broken English were already his trademarks back then!!! Also cool to get a glimpse of his lab, and good schematics of the experiment. TODO exact lab location? Documentary says in Paris, but where?
Edward Witten by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
This dude is generally viewed as a God. His incredibly understated demeanor and tone certainly help.
Video 1.
Unintentional ASMR | Sleepiest Interview Ever | Edward Witten
. Source. The title of this reupload is just epic. Edward telling his biography.
Edward Teller by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
Video 1.
Witnessing the test explosion Edward Teller interview by Web of Stories (1996)
Source.
Video 2.
Edward Teller, An Early Time
. Source. Comissioned by the Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1979. Producer: Mario Balibreraa.
Enrico Fermi by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
Died of cancer at age 53. Ciro Santilli just can't help but speculate that it is linked to radioactivity exposure.

Pinned article: Introduction to the OurBigBook Project

Welcome to the OurBigBook Project! Our goal is to create the perfect publishing platform for STEM subjects, and get university-level students to write the best free STEM tutorials ever.
Everyone is welcome to create an account and play with the site: ourbigbook.com/go/register. We belive that students themselves can write amazing tutorials, but teachers are welcome too. You can write about anything you want, it doesn't have to be STEM or even educational. Silly test content is very welcome and you won't be penalized in any way. Just keep it legal!
We have two killer features:
  1. topics: topics group articles by different users with the same title, e.g. here is the topic for the "Fundamental Theorem of Calculus" ourbigbook.com/go/topic/fundamental-theorem-of-calculus
    Articles of different users are sorted by upvote within each article page. This feature is a bit like:
    • a Wikipedia where each user can have their own version of each article
    • a Q&A website like Stack Overflow, where multiple people can give their views on a given topic, and the best ones are sorted by upvote. Except you don't need to wait for someone to ask first, and any topic goes, no matter how narrow or broad
    This feature makes it possible for readers to find better explanations of any topic created by other writers. And it allows writers to create an explanation in a place that readers might actually find it.
    Figure 1.
    Screenshot of the "Derivative" topic page
    . View it live at: ourbigbook.com/go/topic/derivative
  2. local editing: you can store all your personal knowledge base content locally in a plaintext markup format that can be edited locally and published either:
    This way you can be sure that even if OurBigBook.com were to go down one day (which we have no plans to do as it is quite cheap to host!), your content will still be perfectly readable as a static site.
    Figure 2.
    You can publish local OurBigBook lightweight markup files to either https://OurBigBook.com or as a static website
    .
    Figure 3.
    Visual Studio Code extension installation
    .
    Figure 4.
    Visual Studio Code extension tree navigation
    .
    Figure 5.
    Web editor
    . You can also edit articles on the Web editor without installing anything locally.
    Video 3.
    Edit locally and publish demo
    . Source. This shows editing OurBigBook Markup and publishing it using the Visual Studio Code extension.
    Video 4.
    OurBigBook Visual Studio Code extension editing and navigation demo
    . Source.
  3. https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook-media/master/feature/x/hilbert-space-arrow.png
  4. Infinitely deep tables of contents:
    Figure 6.
    Dynamic article tree with infinitely deep table of contents
    .
    Descendant pages can also show up as toplevel e.g.: ourbigbook.com/cirosantilli/chordate-subclade
All our software is open source and hosted at: github.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook
Further documentation can be found at: docs.ourbigbook.com
Feel free to reach our to us for any help or suggestions: docs.ourbigbook.com/#contact