TechieDamien@lemmy.ml 2 days ago
Don’t forget Noether! She discovered one of the most fundamental theorems of the universe: (paraphrasing) there is a 1:1 relationship between a conservation law (eg momentum) and symmetry (eg spacetime). This has shaped a lot of modern physics and helped explain otherwise unexplainable phenomena!
5too@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Hadn’t heard of her before! The theorem sounds interesting, but the Wikipedia article is a bit dense - I got that “any system with symmetry will have conserved values”, but I got lost on the implications. Would you mind expanding on her theorem?
TechieDamien@lemmy.ml 1 day ago
Sure, the biggest implication is now we can look for symmetries in the universe and deduce a conservation law (with much difficulty by people way better at maths than me). This conservation law is not going to be broken by further refinements of our models, as it is inherent to the system. For example, you probably learnt about conservation of energy when learning Newtonian mechanics, but since this is a product of symmetry (in time iirc), then future refinements such as special or general relativity won’t break conservation of energy. The only way it could is if the symmetry is not fully accurate, like in quantum, where fluctuations in energy are possible, but very minor (providing phenomena such as the Casimir effect).
Most of the details are beyond me, and the maths certainly is, so please don’t take my interpretation of the literature as gospel!
5too@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
So it lets us work out certain laws inherent in our universe? Wow, I did miss that implication…