Like the other comment says, this can be done with a beam-expanding telescope (which can be as simple as two lenses whose focal length ratios determine the magnification). https://www.newport.com/n/how-to-build-a-beam-expander and https://www.thorlabs.com/an-example-of-a-diy-keplerian-beam-... are a good place to start.
But it can be a bit more complicated than that , and it's often easier to use an LED.
Thanks for sharing it!
To be honest, though, this seems like ideal content for an LLM to produce. It's basically fact regurgitation.
This page wasn’t a regurgitation of facts. It was filled with custom interactive applets that let you explore the effects of physical changes. The core value proposition here is not the facts but the ability to explore and intuit the physics.
I'm not so sure it's that far out of reach, though. From what I've seen the reasoning models do, they're not too far away from being able to run a strategy of figuring out interesting increments of a problem, parameterizing them, making an interactive scene for those parameters, ... it feels within reach.
I personally doubt LLMs are close to producing anything like this, but that wasn’t the point. You indicated that this should be easy for an LLM because it’s just a fact dump. Regardless of whether some future LLM can generate something like this, it’s much more complicated and interesting than a simple fact dump.
You're trolling us, right? "Basically fact regurgitation" is all that teachers do after all. Have you ever noticed the difference between an inspirational teacher and a not-so-inspiring one in terms of effectiveness of communication and the "ah ha!" or lack of moments in your own understanding? If you can honestly say "no", then I might be able to understand your statement above, but really?
Some discussion then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25357315