10 ms·

All of Physics in 9 Lines

199 points by harperlee 3y ago

HFguy 3y ago
Not a physicist. How would someone go from these to maxells equations? Wondering just how big a leap is required?
- codethief 3y ago
  This is line 6. It basically implies[0] a specific form for the electromagnetic Lagrangian from which Maxwell's equations follow immediately. For the Lagrangian and the derivation of Maxwell's equations see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covariant_formulation_of_classical_electromagnetism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covariant_formulation_of_cla... . [0]: The author is being very sloppy – tons of additional structure and additional assumptions are silently implied by his "9 lines".
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
mellosouls 3y ago
Unfortunately this website (and the cheat sheet here) seems to be motivated and evidenced at least in part by the speculative theories of the author so it is difficult for the layperson to determine what here is of value. For example, the derivation of General Relativity (quite a significant part of physics!) apparently follows from the author's own "Maximum Force" theory in Item (3). ps. previously discussed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30733666 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30733666
- raverbashing 3y ago
  Yeah I'm not so convinced that Maximum Force implies GR (and by extension gravity - even if Newtonian), seems to be a very wishy-washy assertion
- javajosh 3y ago
  Yes, and one should be very wary of someone who speaks in absolutes. That said, there IS a valid point to be made to highlight the inordinate success of modern physical theories. It's annoying when the only physics news is sensationalist psuedo-science "heresy" from those who don't even know what they're rebelling against. Sean Carrol does a great job of making this argument in an hour-long video "Quantum Field Theory and the Limits of Knowledge - Sean Carroll - 12/7/22": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REITVohWOO0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REITVohWOO0 He makes a much more precise, and I think powerful, argument that we actually know quite a lot.
weinzierl 3y ago
> What determines the principles in lines 1 to 5? They imply that there is a smallest length and time interval. I would love if someone could elaborate this point.
- tekla 3y ago
  Planck length and Planck time. Not a physicist, but from what I recall, the Planck length is presumed to be the smallest measurable distance before stuff turns into a black hole, which isn't very useful Planck time is the time required for light in a vacuum to travel the Planck length. Physics goes to shit if you try to go shorter on either measurement.
  - codethief 3y ago
    Important addition: Most statements regarding Planck units are hypotheses or educated guesses at best. (Other people call them numerology – because people simply combined some fundamental constants and out came the Planck units.) We don't really know whether there is a minimum length or minimum time, what happens at the Planck scales etc.
  - frob 3y ago
    These are the scales at which neither General relativity nor the standard model (QM, QFT, etc) dominate, so you cannot just ignore one and do the calculations with the other. To solve systems at these scales, you need a working system of quantum gravity. We do not yet have one of those. These quantities are essentially where our current models of physics break down and we can no longer make anything resembling a prediction.
  - monster_group 3y ago
    Not a physicist either but currently self learning quantum physics. Note that Planck length and time are just units - they do not mean that space and time are quantized. Quantum theory treats space and time as continuous variables. While it has been speculated that space and time are quantized I do not believe this has been experimentally verified because the scales involved are beyond current experimental reach.
zabzonk 3y ago
> The 9 lines contain all natural sciences. They contain physics, chemistry, material science, biology, medicine, geology, astronomy and all engineering disciplines. so, can you go from these to predict the structure of DNA/RNA and predicting how they work? also, I don't like the use of "nature" as some sort of concious entity that prefers some behaviors to others.
- turnsout 3y ago
  Line 10: Nature dislikes anthropomorphization
- agumonkey 3y ago
  nature is left as an exercise to the reader
  - westurner 3y ago
    The physical world cannot be sufficiently described or predicted without superfluids, n-body gravity problems, and emergence.
- UncleSlacky 3y ago
  "All science is either physics or stamp collecting" - Sir Ernest Rutherford
  - zabzonk 3y ago
    if he had studied molecular biology he might have had a different opinion - though probably not.
  - goatlover 3y ago
    Evolution, geology, meteorology are just stamp collecting? They have their own explanatory models. Maybe they entirely reduce to extremely complicated physics, but we have no means of explaining them as such.
turnsout 3y ago
Line 1: > Action W = ∫ L dt is minimized in local motion. The lines below fix the two fundamental Lagrangians L. Well, you lost me. As a non-physicist maybe I'm not ready for the distillation of the field into 9 lines.
- agumonkey 3y ago
  L is a path, and W its sum along time, furthermore dW = 0 means W is always minimized (things take the cheapest, lowest .. whatever metaphor for minimum makes sense in a context) that's my understanding as a non physicist .. but dW means local minima or maxima.. so i'm confused :)
  - frob 3y ago
    To be additionally pedantic as a physicist, dW = 0 means we have extramized the action. Technically, we are looking for a path of stable action (i.e. a small change to the path does not change the action), so both maxima, minima, and even saddle curves are allowed solutions.
    - agumonkey 3y ago
      thanks, appreciated the pedantism :)
  - frutiger 3y ago
    L is the Lagrangian, not a Path. The action W is the Lagrangian integrated (or summed) along a path.
  - amluto 3y ago
    If you want to learn, and potentially really understand, some of this, I would ignore the physics entirely and start with the calculus of variations [0]. It's fairly straightforward (at least insofar as anyone with some basic differential calculus background ought to be able to understand the formulation and follow the derivation of the Euler-Lagrange equation), and it's useful. You can use it to derive Snell's Law or to design gears or to make pretty curves or the fastest possible ramps. Or you can figure out what L=T-U means, and use the Euler-Lagrange equation to recover F=ma from L=T-U, and you have classical mechanics! And then you can go off the deep end and figure out how this all applies to quantum field theory :) (L isn't a path. It's a scalar-valued function mapping the state of a system to a scaler. In C, with one classical particle, it might be double L(double t, double x, double v) where t is time, x is position, and v is velocity. IMO the simplest example from physics that actually makes sense as a minimization problem is the principle of least time: light going from point A to point B takes the fastest path. This seems a bit silly at first glance -- light travels along without having any idea where it's going. But it really is self-consistent: light propagates through space and through materials such that, wherever it ends up, it gets there by a locally fastest possible route. From this, you can derive specular reflection as well as Snell's Law (refraction) and you can start to understand mirages, e.g. why hot roads look shiny in the distance.) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calculus_of_variations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calculus_of_variations is a so-so start -- IMO it's a bit rambly and doesn't do a great job of getting to the point.
ak_111 3y ago
Amazing that almost everything after 1 (apart from 5) is circa 100 years old. And almost nothing is newer than circa 50 years ago.
- boxed 3y ago
  Doesn't matter much since this seems to be not really true anyway...
  - hgsgm 3y ago
    That's not what's wrong with it. There has been almost no definitive progress in fundamental physics in the past 50-100 years.
    - czzr 3y ago
      40-50 years, maybe. 100 years is greatly overstating it - for example, the unification of all forces except gravity dates to the 70s.
    - mr_mitm 3y ago
      That's exaggerated. The Schrödinger equation was published in 1926 and tons of particles have been discovered in the decades after. But most would agree that progress has been slow in the past 50 years, with the discovery of dark energy 30 years ago being one of the most significant ones.
    - boxed 3y ago
      That's just the way science and technology works. You get the largest gains at the beginning as you're picking the low hanging fruit. You could say the same of chemistry too. Or even about industrialization in general.
fellowmartian 3y ago
As a programmer this looks unusable because of all the overloads implied.
Jabbles 3y ago
To anyone interested in learning physics, I suggest reading https://www.susanrigetti.com/physics https://www.susanrigetti.com/physics Do not try to learn anything from the submitted article, it promotes a, shall we say, "non-traditional" view of physics that is unlikely to be helpful.
- codethief 3y ago
  I wouldn't call all of it "non-traditional" (though some of it is). Either way, the author is being very sloppy with his "proofs", so it's hard to learn anything from the article unless you already know the details.
  - amluto 3y ago
    (5) (the minimum value of entropy) seems to come from an extremely hand-wavy argument on page 5 here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.09914 https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.09914 It appears to be an example of argument by italics. I’m not convinced that it has any real content — it seems to be trying to say that the author thinks all systems are either being observed or they aren’t, and that there are therefore at least two microstates. I think this is entirely missing the point and is mostly wrong. Even in the highly classical case of a gas, you have a box full of gas, with n particles and some volume V, etc. Those parameters form the macro state. Now you count microstates, take the log, and get the entropy. But nowhere in the count is a set of states where the gas is observed and a set where it isn’t. If you have a box of gas with n particle, etc, it’s implied that the gas exists! So I don’t buy it. I’ll stick with S >= 0.
    - pdonis 3y ago
      > (the minimum value of entropy) seems to come from an extremely hand-wavy argument So does the "maximum force" argument, which is given in this paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0309118 https://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0309118 It is, to say the least, not generally accepted as a valid argument.
      - 3y ago
nathan_compton 3y ago
I was trained as a physicist and I love physics, but I believe it is a genuinely open question whether all these laws, which probably do encompass physics per se as we know it, actually therefor encompass the whole world. If you genuinely believe in emergent phenomena, then these laws genuinely do not describe all the things that happen in the universe. I do not believe in emergence in this form, but some philosophers of science do.
- kosievdmerwe 3y ago
  How do you mean emergent phenomena? Like with gliders and stuff in Conway's game of life? Where the rules of the game are trivial, but the higher level behavior is not. That said, if that's what you mean, then it's been my belief for a long time that if we were given a book with all the true laws of physics at the lowest level we would still need to spend centuries deriving useful approximations for our practical concerns at the larger scales.
  - hgsgm 3y ago
    It's a pretty standard belief. We've spent centuries as a species investigating the consequences of simple approcimate rules like F=ma.
  - nathan_compton 3y ago
    Well, consider the art installation called Descension by Anish Kapoor[1]. The vortex which makes up the piece emerges from the constraints imposed upon the fluid by the artist. If we replaced the water in the installation with any fluid with similar viscosity, the vortex would remain. Thus it appears to be the case that the vortex does _not_ supervene upon the actual substances which makes it up per se. In the case of Descension the constraints are somewhat artificial and imposed by the artist. Arguably, the phenomena supervenes upon the physical structure of those constraints. But consider some living organism. It's various physical parts might be replaced by other parts with similar properties (with respect to their function) and the organism would keep existing as itself. But there isn't any particular substance which maintains the constraints which define the organism. Some philosophers of science (eg Terrance Deacon) uphold that this means emergent phenomenon do not supervene upon their material constituents per se, and are thus not determined by the laws of physics which dictate their properties. I don't buy it, but it is a position. [1] https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2015/02/anish-kapoor-decension-vortex/ https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2015/02/anish-kapoor-decensio...
roenxi 3y ago
> No known observation and no known measurement contradicts these 9 lines, not even in the last significant digit. Surely this is technically incorrect; there are countless observations that disagree with these 9 lines. We just suspect they are caused by measurement or operator error. There is evidence of all sorts of impossible things if you stick to just what is recorded. There can't be that many machines capable of measuring the extreme least-significant digit of these constants.
- fbdab103 3y ago
  Many of the "27 numbers" have fairly wide (relative) error bars as well. We literally do not have exact values for several of these.
- coldtea 3y ago
  >there are countless observations that disagree with these 9 lines. We just suspect they are caused by measurement or operator error That's not his point though. Obviously those are not included in the observations that matter. Same way "there can't be any evidence of a perpetual motion machine" is not refuted by people coming up with their "evidence".
  - roenxi 3y ago
    His point is technically incorrect. He can't exclude all the contradicting observations then conclude that all the observations agree. That is a tautology by construction. And it is also unscientific, the physical constants don't have hard boundaries. Each significant digit gets fuzzier the until we just can't guess what the next one is. There are going to be measurements that disagree about the least significant digit. We can't even be that confident they are constants. We've only had good measurements of them for a few centuries. He's right that proving that would be a big deal, but it isn't true to say that there are no inconsistent measurements.
bmacho 3y ago
Too bad that quantum and relativity don't go together, and most probably all the listed equations are wrong at the conceptual level: the concepts that are denoted by the letters do not exist.
fbdab103 3y ago
Kind of cheating, if the "9 rules" have numerous bullet points. Rule eight has 18 non-specified bullet points. Rule nine, 27.
- davidmurdoch 3y ago
  The title of this HN post could be "all of physics in 1 line"!
  - whoopdedo 3y ago
    The beginning of the International Obfuscated Physics Contest.
- squeaky-clean 3y ago
  It's like those "3 step recipes" where each step is 2 paragraphs of steps.
binbag 3y ago
Why does this read like a cult manifesto?
- dschuetz 3y ago
  Obey the 9 Lines.
ekiauhce 3y ago
Unreadable on iOS 16.6 and browser Firefox 116.2 (33536). Text overflows right border and can’t be scrolled Toggle “ask for desktop version” doesn’t make any difference
- xvector 3y ago
  Use Reader mode
turzmo 3y ago
Relevant Feynman: https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/II_25.html https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/II_25.html (At the bottom, cf. “unworldliness”) Physicist here, I don’t want to be too dismissive because reducing physics down to its basic principles is part of the game. However, I’m not sure this covers everything. We need a description or at least characterization of 4D Minkowski space. Continuity and even differentiability of functions is assumed. I also am not sure that canonical quantization is covered by this list. Quantizing the EM field, for example, is a big pain and not simply implied by the EM Lagrangian or even any quantization rules. I do not think you can go from this list to non-commuting Hermitian operators acting on a Hilbert space.
- abnry 3y ago
  The article is highly opinionated. This basically opens the floodgates for critical comments. But like you, I sense some value here, because distilling to fundamental principles is part of the game in physics. I am not knowledgeable enough to comment on how accurate it all is, but I am reminded of amazing things like Noether's theorem, where conservation principles come from symmetries. I would love to understand all of this better, and my assumption is that producing results from symmetries is what much of particle physics is focused on. I think I'm okay with how opinionated this article is because, while I am not qualified to judge, it gives me an incredible sense of the wonder of physics. And I think opinionated intuitions, albeit somewhat wrong or imprecise, are useful for guiding ones understanding.
- the_seb 3y ago
  Thanks for your input. Since you're knowledgeable about this, can I ask about the thermodynamics part? My understanding is that thermodynamics involve macroscopic laws that are based on microscopic laws. This is similar to how chemistry depends on physics. So why must thermodynamics be included in this list? Isn't all of macroscopic (thermodynamics) physics derived from the microscopic just like chemistry?
  - krastanov 3y ago
    I will be a bit sloppy with my description here: There are two ways to "prove" thermodinamics. You can start from the axioms of probability and statistics *together* with an assumption that matter is made out of atoms or similar constituents, and you can derive, through statistical physics, most of thermodynamics. That is a perfectly reasonable and practical way to do it. However, it is extremely valuable to also understand that the vast majority of thermodynamics (including our understanding of entropy) can be derived from completely independent axioms that have no relationship to information theory or the knowledge of discreteness of matter. You need to define temperature as an transitive observable (zeroth law of thermodynamics), you need to define heat as a type of energy (first law of thermodynamics), and you need some version of the second law (there are a few equivalent ones, but the easiest is that "heat flows only from high temperature to low temperature"). Lastly, you need equations of state as a starting point (instead of assumptions about the microscoping constituents of matter). Tadaaa, you have all that is necessary to derive all our knowledge of thermodynamics without knowing statistics or atoms. Aesthetically this is incredibly pleasing and intellectually it is quite surprising that these two sets of axioms that look nothing alike produce the same self-consistent physics. To be productive in cutting edge research you usually need to be comfortable with both. Edit: corrected associative -> transitive as pointed out below.
Horffupolde 3y ago
This is confusing the representation of something for the thing itself. It’s like thinking that the word John is enough to know the person John.
demondemidi 3y ago
Is this New Physics like the New Math? Make 10 from 8 + 5... or ... reduce Maxwell's equations into U(1)?
- tamimio 3y ago
  Ha! First thing I was looking for is Maxwell’s equations and more shocked that they got summarized in U(1) only :)
DrDroop 3y ago
Ok, now I just need to know what a Lagrangian is.
- richk449 3y ago
  I assume you are joking, but for others reference, this is a great way to answer that question: http://ppc.inr.ac.ru/uploads/476_Hamill.pdf http://ppc.inr.ac.ru/uploads/476_Hamill.pdf
- mbivert 3y ago
  Lagrangian mechanics[0] is a compact way to describe the dynamics of a physical system using a single object/equation. You can think of it a a generic description of a system, from which you can extract the equations of motions of the particles forming that system: which is generally an important part of what physicists wants to achieve, i.e. predicting the motion of objects. I'm not qualified to provide you with a more precise, still concise and (hopefully) still accurate description. However, if you want to dig further, the most beginner friendly introduction that I've stumbled upon is Susskind's The Theoretical Minimum - Classical Mechanics [1](there's a book & a series of videos). [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrangian_mechanics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrangian_mechanics [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Theoretical_Minimum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Theoretical_Minimum
ziofill 3y ago
Physicist here. I have no idea what they mean by the entropy having to be larger than klog2 “implies” thermodynamics. Implies it how?
- coldtea 3y ago
  Based on the book he points to, it goes somewhat like this: (...) people asked what entropy was microscopically. The answer can be formulated in various ways. The two most extreme answers are: Entropy measures the (logarithm of the) number 𝑊 of possible microscopic states. A given macroscopic state can have many microscopic realizations. The logarithm of this number, multiplied by the Boltzmann constant 𝑘, gives the entropy.* Entropy is the expected number of yes-or-no questions, multiplied by 𝑘 ln 2, the answers of which would tell us everything about the system, i.e., about its microscopic state. In short, the higher the entropy, the more microstates are possible. Through either of these definitions, entropy measures the quantity of randomness in a system. In other words, entropy measures the transformability of energy: higher entropy means lower transformability. Alternatively, entropy measures the freedom in the choice of microstate that a system has. (...) Before we complete our discussion of thermal physics we must point out in another way the importance of the Boltzmann constant 𝑘. We have seen that this constant appears whenever the granularity of matter plays a role; it expresses the fact that matter is made of small basic entities. The most striking way to put this statement is the following: There is a characteristic entropy change in nature for single particles: Δ𝑆 ≈ 𝑘. This result is almost 100 years old; it was stated most clearly (with a different numerical factor) by Leo Szilard. The same point was made by Léon Brillouin (again with a different numerical factor. The statement can also be taken as the definition of the Boltzmann constant 𝑘. The existence of a characteristic entropy change in nature is a powerful statement. It eliminates the possibility of the continuity of matter and also that of its fractality. A characteristic entropy implies that matter is made of a finite number of small components. The existence of a characteristic entropy has numerous consequences. First of all, it sheds light on the third principle of thermodynamics. A characteristic entropy implies that absolute zero temperature is not achievable. Secondly, a characteristic entropy explains why entropy values are finite instead of infinite. Thirdly, it fixes the absolute value of entropy for every system; in continuum physics, entropy, like energy, is only defined up to an additive constant. The quantum of entropy settles all these issues.
tamimio 3y ago
There goes my next month reading these books.
- gus_massa 3y ago
  This post is wrong. Get better sources to study. There are a few comments here that explains the errors, and there are a few additional comments about other problems in the previous submission https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30733666 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30733666
pphysch 3y ago
This is kind of like "LLaMa implemented in 9 lines of Python" and 8 of those 9 lines are import statements followed by a huge one-liner composing library functions If civilization were to collapse tomorrow and the survivors were left in the stone age with "All of Physics in 9 lines", it would arguably be useless. There's so much missing/buried context.
quantum_mcts 3y ago
Similar stuff by this guy already posted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32367085 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32367085 It is a crackpot pseudoscience.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
hot_gril 3y ago
Non-physicist here. Was hoping this would do something for me, but unfortunately... Very first line, I look up "Lagrangian" to see what L means, and I get ten different definitions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrangian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrangian. I'm guessing it's the one that says kinetic minus potential energy, but that seems arbitrary (unlike the sum which would be total energy). Couldn't this be more specific? Most of the other lines have terms/constants/variables that I've never heard of or don't remember from school, and usually it's "Lagrangian" again. I don't know what it means to fix, restrict, yield, or complete a Lagrangian. I could keep reading about that, but at this point I don't think I'm learning physics the right way. If there's one thing I remember from class, it's that there aren't many shortcuts here; usually you have to start at fundamentals and prove your way up. Also, idk how entropy ≥ (some constant) implies thermodynamics, and seems the physicists here don't see it either.
- thechao 3y ago
  "The theoretical minimum" series by Leonard Susskind et al. (along with the video series in YT) is a supergentle introduction & gloss of this whole table. If you stick to the books you'll never have to read popsci crap, again, except to join in with the eye rolling.
- consilient 3y ago
  > I'm guessing it's the one that says kinetic minus potential energy, but that seems arbitrary It is arbitrary, in some sense: Lagrangians are specifications of a physical system in the same way that laws of motion are. Instead of directly describing a trajectory as the solution to some set of differential equations, the Lagrangian approach describes it as a stationary point (an extremum or a saddle point) of the action, which is the integral of the Lagrangian over time. The resulting equations of motion are then given by the Euler-Lagrange equation. L = K - V is (one formulation of) the Lagrangian for a system that obeys Newton's laws. Other systems have other Lagrangians, from which we get other laws of motion. The other important formulation of classical mechanics is the Hamiltonian one, which very roughly speaking reparameterizes the Euler-Lagrange equation in terms of (generalized) positions and momenta, instead of just position. This turns your n-dimensional second order differential equation into a 2n-dimensional first order one, which is often more convenient to work with. For simple "ideal billiard balls in a vacuum" situations it makes very little difference what approach you use, but Newtonian mechanics generalizes poorly. All of modern physics is based on the Lagrangian and Hamiltonian approaches.
sdeframond 3y ago
Funny. I feel like this is a highly compressed description of physics. Only that the codec needed to actually decompress (understand) it is huge. Edit: from an information theory perspective.
ralferoo 3y ago
I'm not a physicist, so I'm not really qualified to comment on whether a "real physicist" would say the fundamental assertion is true or not, but from a simple linguistics point of view, this article is pure click bait. At school, I studied physics for 7 years. Nothing I was taught is hinted at by any of these 9 points, or at least in any way I'm able to recognise after receiving all that teaching, except perhaps some of the constants (they're not listed, but I assume there will be an overlap). Did I, in fact, learn absolutely nothing about physics in all those 7 years? It's much more likely to be the case that from a simple linguistics point of view, these 9 lines do not contain "all of physics", but rather than just the parts of physics that the author considers to be the most fundamental. Maybe if you have decades of highly specialised study you have a chance of remembering most of the rest of what's needed to fill in all the (known) gaps and assumptions those 9 lines are based on and hint at. And the fact that each "line" links to an entire volume that tries to fill in those gaps (I have no idea if they succeed in doing that or not), shows that this isn't anywhere close to what it claims to be. It's about as vacuous a statement as trying to summarise all of maths as "the set of all possible sets" or all of philosophy as "cogito ergo sum".
- coldtea 3y ago
  >but rather than just the parts of physics that the author considers to be the most fundamental. Fundamental is what "contains all of physics" means in this context (key word: contains). The rest would be emergent properties.
  - goatlover 3y ago
    Can the emergent properties be derived from just the nine lines?
    - coldtea 3y ago
      I'd say that if a capable scientist like Einstein was given them (assuming they didn't know the rest of the theories), they could build upon them to derive or get to close guesses of large parts of physics. The lines are quite loaded with broad equations that covers very fundamental stuff - including constants and elementary particles. A few equations being fundamental for big theories built upon them wouldn't be unheard of. Maxwell's equations for example cover several important fields of Physics. Newton's 3 laws cover classical mechanics.
mxkopy 3y ago
Wightman axioms better
potamic 3y ago
Which of these talks about the speed of light being constant for all frames of reference? This to me is one of the most fundamental and bizarre aspects of the universe.
- lisper 3y ago
  That was point #2.
danbruc 3y ago
Whatever equation you have, bring everything to the left side, define a new variable Ω as whatever you have on the left side. Behold the ultimate theory of the universe. Ω = 0
- agnosticmantis 3y ago
  There are some inequalities too, so we need some slack variables. /s
littlestymaar 3y ago
This is not “all of physics” because we are still pretty far from deriving all physics from the microscopic scale: there's still a good chunk of physics that relies on macro-scale empirically-derived formulas. For instance: fluid mechanics and granular material mechanics.
jenadine 3y ago
All of Physics in 1 Line: 1. All of physics

199 points by harperlee 3y ago

HFguy 3y ago

Not a physicist. How would someone go from these to maxells equations? Wondering just how big a leap is required?

codethief 3y ago
This is line 6. It basically implies[0] a specific form for the electromagnetic Lagrangian from which Maxwell's equations follow immediately. For the Lagrangian and the derivation of Maxwell's equations see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covariant_formulation_of_classical_electromagnetism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covariant_formulation_of_cla... . [0]: The author is being very sloppy – tons of additional structure and additional assumptions are silently implied by his "9 lines".
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

mellosouls 3y ago

Unfortunately this website (and the cheat sheet here) seems to be motivated and evidenced at least in part by the speculative theories of the author so it is difficult for the layperson to determine what here is of value. For example, the derivation of General Relativity (quite a significant part of physics!) apparently follows from the author's own "Maximum Force" theory in Item (3). ps. previously discussed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30733666 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30733666

raverbashing 3y ago
Yeah I'm not so convinced that Maximum Force implies GR (and by extension gravity - even if Newtonian), seems to be a very wishy-washy assertion
javajosh 3y ago
Yes, and one should be very wary of someone who speaks in absolutes. That said, there IS a valid point to be made to highlight the inordinate success of modern physical theories. It's annoying when the only physics news is sensationalist psuedo-science "heresy" from those who don't even know what they're rebelling against. Sean Carrol does a great job of making this argument in an hour-long video "Quantum Field Theory and the Limits of Knowledge - Sean Carroll - 12/7/22": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REITVohWOO0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REITVohWOO0 He makes a much more precise, and I think powerful, argument that we actually know quite a lot.

weinzierl 3y ago

> What determines the principles in lines 1 to 5? They imply that there is a smallest length and time interval. I would love if someone could elaborate this point.

tekla 3y ago
Planck length and Planck time. Not a physicist, but from what I recall, the Planck length is presumed to be the smallest measurable distance before stuff turns into a black hole, which isn't very useful Planck time is the time required for light in a vacuum to travel the Planck length. Physics goes to shit if you try to go shorter on either measurement.
- codethief 3y ago
  Important addition: Most statements regarding Planck units are hypotheses or educated guesses at best. (Other people call them numerology – because people simply combined some fundamental constants and out came the Planck units.) We don't really know whether there is a minimum length or minimum time, what happens at the Planck scales etc.
- frob 3y ago
  These are the scales at which neither General relativity nor the standard model (QM, QFT, etc) dominate, so you cannot just ignore one and do the calculations with the other. To solve systems at these scales, you need a working system of quantum gravity. We do not yet have one of those. These quantities are essentially where our current models of physics break down and we can no longer make anything resembling a prediction.
- monster_group 3y ago
  Not a physicist either but currently self learning quantum physics. Note that Planck length and time are just units - they do not mean that space and time are quantized. Quantum theory treats space and time as continuous variables. While it has been speculated that space and time are quantized I do not believe this has been experimentally verified because the scales involved are beyond current experimental reach.

zabzonk 3y ago

> The 9 lines contain all natural sciences. They contain physics, chemistry, material science, biology, medicine, geology, astronomy and all engineering disciplines. so, can you go from these to predict the structure of DNA/RNA and predicting how they work? also, I don't like the use of "nature" as some sort of concious entity that prefers some behaviors to others.

turnsout 3y ago
Line 10: Nature dislikes anthropomorphization
agumonkey 3y ago
nature is left as an exercise to the reader
- westurner 3y ago
  The physical world cannot be sufficiently described or predicted without superfluids, n-body gravity problems, and emergence.
UncleSlacky 3y ago
"All science is either physics or stamp collecting" - Sir Ernest Rutherford
- zabzonk 3y ago
  if he had studied molecular biology he might have had a different opinion - though probably not.
- goatlover 3y ago
  Evolution, geology, meteorology are just stamp collecting? They have their own explanatory models. Maybe they entirely reduce to extremely complicated physics, but we have no means of explaining them as such.

turnsout 3y ago

Line 1: > Action W = ∫ L dt is minimized in local motion. The lines below fix the two fundamental Lagrangians L. Well, you lost me. As a non-physicist maybe I'm not ready for the distillation of the field into 9 lines.

agumonkey 3y ago
L is a path, and W its sum along time, furthermore dW = 0 means W is always minimized (things take the cheapest, lowest .. whatever metaphor for minimum makes sense in a context) that's my understanding as a non physicist .. but dW means local minima or maxima.. so i'm confused :)
- frob 3y ago
  To be additionally pedantic as a physicist, dW = 0 means we have extramized the action. Technically, we are looking for a path of stable action (i.e. a small change to the path does not change the action), so both maxima, minima, and even saddle curves are allowed solutions.
  - agumonkey 3y ago
    thanks, appreciated the pedantism :)
- frutiger 3y ago
  L is the Lagrangian, not a Path. The action W is the Lagrangian integrated (or summed) along a path.
- amluto 3y ago
  If you want to learn, and potentially really understand, some of this, I would ignore the physics entirely and start with the calculus of variations [0]. It's fairly straightforward (at least insofar as anyone with some basic differential calculus background ought to be able to understand the formulation and follow the derivation of the Euler-Lagrange equation), and it's useful. You can use it to derive Snell's Law or to design gears or to make pretty curves or the fastest possible ramps. Or you can figure out what L=T-U means, and use the Euler-Lagrange equation to recover F=ma from L=T-U, and you have classical mechanics! And then you can go off the deep end and figure out how this all applies to quantum field theory :) (L isn't a path. It's a scalar-valued function mapping the state of a system to a scaler. In C, with one classical particle, it might be double L(double t, double x, double v) where t is time, x is position, and v is velocity. IMO the simplest example from physics that actually makes sense as a minimization problem is the principle of least time: light going from point A to point B takes the fastest path. This seems a bit silly at first glance -- light travels along without having any idea where it's going. But it really is self-consistent: light propagates through space and through materials such that, wherever it ends up, it gets there by a locally fastest possible route. From this, you can derive specular reflection as well as Snell's Law (refraction) and you can start to understand mirages, e.g. why hot roads look shiny in the distance.) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calculus_of_variations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calculus_of_variations is a so-so start -- IMO it's a bit rambly and doesn't do a great job of getting to the point.

ak_111 3y ago

Amazing that almost everything after 1 (apart from 5) is circa 100 years old. And almost nothing is newer than circa 50 years ago.

boxed 3y ago
Doesn't matter much since this seems to be not really true anyway...
- hgsgm 3y ago
  That's not what's wrong with it. There has been almost no definitive progress in fundamental physics in the past 50-100 years.
  - czzr 3y ago
    40-50 years, maybe. 100 years is greatly overstating it - for example, the unification of all forces except gravity dates to the 70s.
  - mr_mitm 3y ago
    That's exaggerated. The Schrödinger equation was published in 1926 and tons of particles have been discovered in the decades after. But most would agree that progress has been slow in the past 50 years, with the discovery of dark energy 30 years ago being one of the most significant ones.
  - boxed 3y ago
    That's just the way science and technology works. You get the largest gains at the beginning as you're picking the low hanging fruit. You could say the same of chemistry too. Or even about industrialization in general.

fellowmartian 3y ago

As a programmer this looks unusable because of all the overloads implied.

Jabbles 3y ago

To anyone interested in learning physics, I suggest reading https://www.susanrigetti.com/physics https://www.susanrigetti.com/physics Do not try to learn anything from the submitted article, it promotes a, shall we say, "non-traditional" view of physics that is unlikely to be helpful.

codethief 3y ago
I wouldn't call all of it "non-traditional" (though some of it is). Either way, the author is being very sloppy with his "proofs", so it's hard to learn anything from the article unless you already know the details.
- amluto 3y ago
  (5) (the minimum value of entropy) seems to come from an extremely hand-wavy argument on page 5 here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.09914 https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.09914 It appears to be an example of argument by italics. I’m not convinced that it has any real content — it seems to be trying to say that the author thinks all systems are either being observed or they aren’t, and that there are therefore at least two microstates. I think this is entirely missing the point and is mostly wrong. Even in the highly classical case of a gas, you have a box full of gas, with n particles and some volume V, etc. Those parameters form the macro state. Now you count microstates, take the log, and get the entropy. But nowhere in the count is a set of states where the gas is observed and a set where it isn’t. If you have a box of gas with n particle, etc, it’s implied that the gas exists! So I don’t buy it. I’ll stick with S >= 0.
  - pdonis 3y ago
    > (the minimum value of entropy) seems to come from an extremely hand-wavy argument So does the "maximum force" argument, which is given in this paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0309118 https://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0309118 It is, to say the least, not generally accepted as a valid argument.
    - 3y ago

nathan_compton 3y ago

I was trained as a physicist and I love physics, but I believe it is a genuinely open question whether all these laws, which probably do encompass physics per se as we know it, actually therefor encompass the whole world. If you genuinely believe in emergent phenomena, then these laws genuinely do not describe all the things that happen in the universe. I do not believe in emergence in this form, but some philosophers of science do.

kosievdmerwe 3y ago
How do you mean emergent phenomena? Like with gliders and stuff in Conway's game of life? Where the rules of the game are trivial, but the higher level behavior is not. That said, if that's what you mean, then it's been my belief for a long time that if we were given a book with all the true laws of physics at the lowest level we would still need to spend centuries deriving useful approximations for our practical concerns at the larger scales.
- hgsgm 3y ago
  It's a pretty standard belief. We've spent centuries as a species investigating the consequences of simple approcimate rules like F=ma.
- nathan_compton 3y ago
  Well, consider the art installation called Descension by Anish Kapoor[1]. The vortex which makes up the piece emerges from the constraints imposed upon the fluid by the artist. If we replaced the water in the installation with any fluid with similar viscosity, the vortex would remain. Thus it appears to be the case that the vortex does _not_ supervene upon the actual substances which makes it up per se. In the case of Descension the constraints are somewhat artificial and imposed by the artist. Arguably, the phenomena supervenes upon the physical structure of those constraints. But consider some living organism. It's various physical parts might be replaced by other parts with similar properties (with respect to their function) and the organism would keep existing as itself. But there isn't any particular substance which maintains the constraints which define the organism. Some philosophers of science (eg Terrance Deacon) uphold that this means emergent phenomenon do not supervene upon their material constituents per se, and are thus not determined by the laws of physics which dictate their properties. I don't buy it, but it is a position. [1] https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2015/02/anish-kapoor-decension-vortex/ https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2015/02/anish-kapoor-decensio...

roenxi 3y ago

> No known observation and no known measurement contradicts these 9 lines, not even in the last significant digit. Surely this is technically incorrect; there are countless observations that disagree with these 9 lines. We just suspect they are caused by measurement or operator error. There is evidence of all sorts of impossible things if you stick to just what is recorded. There can't be that many machines capable of measuring the extreme least-significant digit of these constants.

fbdab103 3y ago
Many of the "27 numbers" have fairly wide (relative) error bars as well. We literally do not have exact values for several of these.
coldtea 3y ago
>there are countless observations that disagree with these 9 lines. We just suspect they are caused by measurement or operator error That's not his point though. Obviously those are not included in the observations that matter. Same way "there can't be any evidence of a perpetual motion machine" is not refuted by people coming up with their "evidence".
- roenxi 3y ago
  His point is technically incorrect. He can't exclude all the contradicting observations then conclude that all the observations agree. That is a tautology by construction. And it is also unscientific, the physical constants don't have hard boundaries. Each significant digit gets fuzzier the until we just can't guess what the next one is. There are going to be measurements that disagree about the least significant digit. We can't even be that confident they are constants. We've only had good measurements of them for a few centuries. He's right that proving that would be a big deal, but it isn't true to say that there are no inconsistent measurements.

bmacho 3y ago

Too bad that quantum and relativity don't go together, and most probably all the listed equations are wrong at the conceptual level: the concepts that are denoted by the letters do not exist.

fbdab103 3y ago

Kind of cheating, if the "9 rules" have numerous bullet points. Rule eight has 18 non-specified bullet points. Rule nine, 27.

davidmurdoch 3y ago
The title of this HN post could be "all of physics in 1 line"!
- whoopdedo 3y ago
  The beginning of the International Obfuscated Physics Contest.
squeaky-clean 3y ago
It's like those "3 step recipes" where each step is 2 paragraphs of steps.

binbag 3y ago

Why does this read like a cult manifesto?

dschuetz 3y ago
Obey the 9 Lines.

ekiauhce 3y ago

Unreadable on iOS 16.6 and browser Firefox 116.2 (33536). Text overflows right border and can’t be scrolled Toggle “ask for desktop version” doesn’t make any difference

xvector 3y ago
Use Reader mode

turzmo 3y ago

Relevant Feynman: https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/II_25.html https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/II_25.html (At the bottom, cf. “unworldliness”) Physicist here, I don’t want to be too dismissive because reducing physics down to its basic principles is part of the game. However, I’m not sure this covers everything. We need a description or at least characterization of 4D Minkowski space. Continuity and even differentiability of functions is assumed. I also am not sure that canonical quantization is covered by this list. Quantizing the EM field, for example, is a big pain and not simply implied by the EM Lagrangian or even any quantization rules. I do not think you can go from this list to non-commuting Hermitian operators acting on a Hilbert space.

abnry 3y ago
The article is highly opinionated. This basically opens the floodgates for critical comments. But like you, I sense some value here, because distilling to fundamental principles is part of the game in physics. I am not knowledgeable enough to comment on how accurate it all is, but I am reminded of amazing things like Noether's theorem, where conservation principles come from symmetries. I would love to understand all of this better, and my assumption is that producing results from symmetries is what much of particle physics is focused on. I think I'm okay with how opinionated this article is because, while I am not qualified to judge, it gives me an incredible sense of the wonder of physics. And I think opinionated intuitions, albeit somewhat wrong or imprecise, are useful for guiding ones understanding.
the_seb 3y ago
Thanks for your input. Since you're knowledgeable about this, can I ask about the thermodynamics part? My understanding is that thermodynamics involve macroscopic laws that are based on microscopic laws. This is similar to how chemistry depends on physics. So why must thermodynamics be included in this list? Isn't all of macroscopic (thermodynamics) physics derived from the microscopic just like chemistry?
- krastanov 3y ago
  I will be a bit sloppy with my description here: There are two ways to "prove" thermodinamics. You can start from the axioms of probability and statistics *together* with an assumption that matter is made out of atoms or similar constituents, and you can derive, through statistical physics, most of thermodynamics. That is a perfectly reasonable and practical way to do it. However, it is extremely valuable to also understand that the vast majority of thermodynamics (including our understanding of entropy) can be derived from completely independent axioms that have no relationship to information theory or the knowledge of discreteness of matter. You need to define temperature as an transitive observable (zeroth law of thermodynamics), you need to define heat as a type of energy (first law of thermodynamics), and you need some version of the second law (there are a few equivalent ones, but the easiest is that "heat flows only from high temperature to low temperature"). Lastly, you need equations of state as a starting point (instead of assumptions about the microscoping constituents of matter). Tadaaa, you have all that is necessary to derive all our knowledge of thermodynamics without knowing statistics or atoms. Aesthetically this is incredibly pleasing and intellectually it is quite surprising that these two sets of axioms that look nothing alike produce the same self-consistent physics. To be productive in cutting edge research you usually need to be comfortable with both. Edit: corrected associative -> transitive as pointed out below.

Horffupolde 3y ago

This is confusing the representation of something for the thing itself. It’s like thinking that the word John is enough to know the person John.

demondemidi 3y ago

Is this New Physics like the New Math? Make 10 from 8 + 5... or ... reduce Maxwell's equations into U(1)?

tamimio 3y ago
Ha! First thing I was looking for is Maxwell’s equations and more shocked that they got summarized in U(1) only :)

DrDroop 3y ago

Ok, now I just need to know what a Lagrangian is.

richk449 3y ago
I assume you are joking, but for others reference, this is a great way to answer that question: http://ppc.inr.ac.ru/uploads/476_Hamill.pdf http://ppc.inr.ac.ru/uploads/476_Hamill.pdf
mbivert 3y ago
Lagrangian mechanics[0] is a compact way to describe the dynamics of a physical system using a single object/equation. You can think of it a a generic description of a system, from which you can extract the equations of motions of the particles forming that system: which is generally an important part of what physicists wants to achieve, i.e. predicting the motion of objects. I'm not qualified to provide you with a more precise, still concise and (hopefully) still accurate description. However, if you want to dig further, the most beginner friendly introduction that I've stumbled upon is Susskind's The Theoretical Minimum - Classical Mechanics [1](there's a book & a series of videos). [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrangian_mechanics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrangian_mechanics [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Theoretical_Minimum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Theoretical_Minimum

ziofill 3y ago

Physicist here. I have no idea what they mean by the entropy having to be larger than klog2 “implies” thermodynamics. Implies it how?

coldtea 3y ago
Based on the book he points to, it goes somewhat like this: (...) people asked what entropy was microscopically. The answer can be formulated in various ways. The two most extreme answers are: Entropy measures the (logarithm of the) number 𝑊 of possible microscopic states. A given macroscopic state can have many microscopic realizations. The logarithm of this number, multiplied by the Boltzmann constant 𝑘, gives the entropy.* Entropy is the expected number of yes-or-no questions, multiplied by 𝑘 ln 2, the answers of which would tell us everything about the system, i.e., about its microscopic state. In short, the higher the entropy, the more microstates are possible. Through either of these definitions, entropy measures the quantity of randomness in a system. In other words, entropy measures the transformability of energy: higher entropy means lower transformability. Alternatively, entropy measures the freedom in the choice of microstate that a system has. (...) Before we complete our discussion of thermal physics we must point out in another way the importance of the Boltzmann constant 𝑘. We have seen that this constant appears whenever the granularity of matter plays a role; it expresses the fact that matter is made of small basic entities. The most striking way to put this statement is the following: There is a characteristic entropy change in nature for single particles: Δ𝑆 ≈ 𝑘. This result is almost 100 years old; it was stated most clearly (with a different numerical factor) by Leo Szilard. The same point was made by Léon Brillouin (again with a different numerical factor. The statement can also be taken as the definition of the Boltzmann constant 𝑘. The existence of a characteristic entropy change in nature is a powerful statement. It eliminates the possibility of the continuity of matter and also that of its fractality. A characteristic entropy implies that matter is made of a finite number of small components. The existence of a characteristic entropy has numerous consequences. First of all, it sheds light on the third principle of thermodynamics. A characteristic entropy implies that absolute zero temperature is not achievable. Secondly, a characteristic entropy explains why entropy values are finite instead of infinite. Thirdly, it fixes the absolute value of entropy for every system; in continuum physics, entropy, like energy, is only defined up to an additive constant. The quantum of entropy settles all these issues.

tamimio 3y ago

There goes my next month reading these books.

gus_massa 3y ago
This post is wrong. Get better sources to study. There are a few comments here that explains the errors, and there are a few additional comments about other problems in the previous submission https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30733666 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30733666

pphysch 3y ago

This is kind of like "LLaMa implemented in 9 lines of Python" and 8 of those 9 lines are import statements followed by a huge one-liner composing library functions If civilization were to collapse tomorrow and the survivors were left in the stone age with "All of Physics in 9 lines", it would arguably be useless. There's so much missing/buried context.

quantum_mcts 3y ago

Similar stuff by this guy already posted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32367085 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32367085 It is a crackpot pseudoscience.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

hot_gril 3y ago

Non-physicist here. Was hoping this would do something for me, but unfortunately... Very first line, I look up "Lagrangian" to see what L means, and I get ten different definitions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrangian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrangian. I'm guessing it's the one that says kinetic minus potential energy, but that seems arbitrary (unlike the sum which would be total energy). Couldn't this be more specific? Most of the other lines have terms/constants/variables that I've never heard of or don't remember from school, and usually it's "Lagrangian" again. I don't know what it means to fix, restrict, yield, or complete a Lagrangian. I could keep reading about that, but at this point I don't think I'm learning physics the right way. If there's one thing I remember from class, it's that there aren't many shortcuts here; usually you have to start at fundamentals and prove your way up. Also, idk how entropy ≥ (some constant) implies thermodynamics, and seems the physicists here don't see it either.

thechao 3y ago
"The theoretical minimum" series by Leonard Susskind et al. (along with the video series in YT) is a supergentle introduction & gloss of this whole table. If you stick to the books you'll never have to read popsci crap, again, except to join in with the eye rolling.
consilient 3y ago
> I'm guessing it's the one that says kinetic minus potential energy, but that seems arbitrary It is arbitrary, in some sense: Lagrangians are specifications of a physical system in the same way that laws of motion are. Instead of directly describing a trajectory as the solution to some set of differential equations, the Lagrangian approach describes it as a stationary point (an extremum or a saddle point) of the action, which is the integral of the Lagrangian over time. The resulting equations of motion are then given by the Euler-Lagrange equation. L = K - V is (one formulation of) the Lagrangian for a system that obeys Newton's laws. Other systems have other Lagrangians, from which we get other laws of motion. The other important formulation of classical mechanics is the Hamiltonian one, which very roughly speaking reparameterizes the Euler-Lagrange equation in terms of (generalized) positions and momenta, instead of just position. This turns your n-dimensional second order differential equation into a 2n-dimensional first order one, which is often more convenient to work with. For simple "ideal billiard balls in a vacuum" situations it makes very little difference what approach you use, but Newtonian mechanics generalizes poorly. All of modern physics is based on the Lagrangian and Hamiltonian approaches.

sdeframond 3y ago

Funny. I feel like this is a highly compressed description of physics. Only that the codec needed to actually decompress (understand) it is huge. Edit: from an information theory perspective.

ralferoo 3y ago

I'm not a physicist, so I'm not really qualified to comment on whether a "real physicist" would say the fundamental assertion is true or not, but from a simple linguistics point of view, this article is pure click bait. At school, I studied physics for 7 years. Nothing I was taught is hinted at by any of these 9 points, or at least in any way I'm able to recognise after receiving all that teaching, except perhaps some of the constants (they're not listed, but I assume there will be an overlap). Did I, in fact, learn absolutely nothing about physics in all those 7 years? It's much more likely to be the case that from a simple linguistics point of view, these 9 lines do not contain "all of physics", but rather than just the parts of physics that the author considers to be the most fundamental. Maybe if you have decades of highly specialised study you have a chance of remembering most of the rest of what's needed to fill in all the (known) gaps and assumptions those 9 lines are based on and hint at. And the fact that each "line" links to an entire volume that tries to fill in those gaps (I have no idea if they succeed in doing that or not), shows that this isn't anywhere close to what it claims to be. It's about as vacuous a statement as trying to summarise all of maths as "the set of all possible sets" or all of philosophy as "cogito ergo sum".

coldtea 3y ago
>but rather than just the parts of physics that the author considers to be the most fundamental. Fundamental is what "contains all of physics" means in this context (key word: contains). The rest would be emergent properties.
- goatlover 3y ago
  Can the emergent properties be derived from just the nine lines?
  - coldtea 3y ago
    I'd say that if a capable scientist like Einstein was given them (assuming they didn't know the rest of the theories), they could build upon them to derive or get to close guesses of large parts of physics. The lines are quite loaded with broad equations that covers very fundamental stuff - including constants and elementary particles. A few equations being fundamental for big theories built upon them wouldn't be unheard of. Maxwell's equations for example cover several important fields of Physics. Newton's 3 laws cover classical mechanics.

mxkopy 3y ago

Wightman axioms better

potamic 3y ago

Which of these talks about the speed of light being constant for all frames of reference? This to me is one of the most fundamental and bizarre aspects of the universe.

lisper 3y ago
That was point #2.

danbruc 3y ago

Whatever equation you have, bring everything to the left side, define a new variable Ω as whatever you have on the left side. Behold the ultimate theory of the universe. Ω = 0

agnosticmantis 3y ago
There are some inequalities too, so we need some slack variables. /s

littlestymaar 3y ago

This is not “all of physics” because we are still pretty far from deriving all physics from the microscopic scale: there's still a good chunk of physics that relies on macro-scale empirically-derived formulas. For instance: fluid mechanics and granular material mechanics.

jenadine 3y ago

All of Physics in 1 Line: 1. All of physics