3 ms·
Agreed, thanks. That blog post was just trying to explain what it is, not why it is, mostly as a basis to complain about education rather than teach physics.
by jessriedel 8y ago
Agreed, thanks. That blog post was just trying to explain what it is, not why it is, mostly as a basis to complain about education rather than teach physics.
- Misdicorl 8y agoThe why is actually quite simple- and the same reason the Fourier transform is sometimes used. Some problems are simply more elegantly expressed in a particular basis system. Nobody tries to express a ball's motion in flight via Fourier analysis, but you certainly could. In the same way, sometimes solutions for the position(s) of a system is the most natural basis system for describing/investigating a problem (use the Lagrangian) and sometimes solutions for its momentum are (use the Hamiltonian). Of course, they're intrinsically linked since the evolution of one determines the evolution of the other.