A New Way To Visualize General Relativity

by Mike Levin

May the forth be with you; the forth of gravity.

Nat Installed Manim on Windows Under Jupyter

Today was a huge day for several reasons. Nat got Manim installed on Windows. We tried on the Linux side of Windows first, but the Chocolatey approach which she started herself ended up being key. On the advice of the Manim site, Nat installed the official Python.org version of Python on her machine instead of the more easy Windows Store version.

Standalone Jupyter With VirtualEnv Python 3.10 Kernel

Then she did something I never even was able to do for myself until now, which is set up a virtualenv for the new Desktop JupyterLab, and then update it to use the brand new Python 3.10 kernel. Not that Nat had to because by this time she used Chocolatey to install the Windows version of vim and ran it through Powershell to create .py files. But still Jupyter is a bit better for Manim-style exploratory programming. But Manim actually requires .py files, so Nat started using nbconvert to convert the .ipynb files to .py files.

And Then This Video

And to top it off, Nat sent me this video which I agree is the best way I’ve ever seen to visualize general relativity, especially how the curvature of space gives rise to time. Amazing! I can really appreciate her interest in the Python Manim math visualization and animation package.