John Carlos Baez on Nostr: Shalma Wegsman is a "writing fellow" at Quanta magazine. I told her some really cool ...
Shalma Wegsman is a "writing fellow" at Quanta magazine. I told her some really cool stuff about Noether's theorem, which goes beyond the stuff you always hear. She understood it, was excited about it, and seemed to want to explain it. Alas, her article doesn't mention any of that stuff. At the end it says
“There’s a lot we have left to learn by thinking hard about Noether’s theorem,” the mathematical physicist John Baez said. “It has layers and layers of depth to it.”
But none of these layers of depth are actually discussed. 😿
Perhaps they would be too much for readers to digest. But it's a pity that every pop science explanation of Noether's theorem stops at roughly the same point... just where things are starting to get really cool.
This is why I do my own science popularization.
The *good* news is that she explains time translation symmetry, and she says Noether's theorem only works for theories described using a Lagrangian. Maybe that counts as going deeper than usual.
(I gave her an example of what can go wrong when your theory *isn't* described using a Lagrangian.)
https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-noethers-theorem-revolutionized-physics-20250207/
“There’s a lot we have left to learn by thinking hard about Noether’s theorem,” the mathematical physicist John Baez said. “It has layers and layers of depth to it.”
But none of these layers of depth are actually discussed. 😿
Perhaps they would be too much for readers to digest. But it's a pity that every pop science explanation of Noether's theorem stops at roughly the same point... just where things are starting to get really cool.
This is why I do my own science popularization.
The *good* news is that she explains time translation symmetry, and she says Noether's theorem only works for theories described using a Lagrangian. Maybe that counts as going deeper than usual.
(I gave her an example of what can go wrong when your theory *isn't* described using a Lagrangian.)
https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-noethers-theorem-revolutionized-physics-20250207/