Physics Lournal
Powered by 🌱Roam Garden2. What a Wonderful World
The aesthetic arguments that rise up in defense of theories in Physics stem from an unobjective time in the past, where nature was seen as reflecting divinity.
One of the first people to generate quantitative laws about the works of nature, was Kepler.
Kepler determined the planets orbited circularly, but eventually revised this to elliptical orbits, to the dismay of those who felt ellipses were imperfect, and unfit for the paths of celestial bodies.
Newton too, believed that his observations of nature were influenced by God.
His counterpart Leibniz also believed that Earth was the pinnacle of creation.
Symmetry
A symmetry is a rule, sequence, congruence, or arrangement, that can be encapsulated in math as a representation of symmetry.
As opposed to enumeration the cardinal directions, and what color the sky is at each point, we simply say, the sky is blue. The color of the sky is invariant under direction- this is an example of a rotational-symmetry.
Physicists tend to dealer with symmetries of a higher level of complexity, such as rotations along multiple axes.
The big win of symmetry, was in deriving the quark model - particle collisions revealed a large number of smaller particles, which seemed to have no relation to each other.
Their relationship, was revealed once Gell-Mann identified two properties of these particles: Isospin and Hypercharge, which allowed them to be classified in symmetrical patterns called multiplets.
