Monday, January 30, 2006

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but it used to be a quark

It is said that those who can't do, become critics. In an interesting twist of events, this two sided argument became mobius-like, wrapping and twisting around a higher dimension and becoming one sided.

This left everyone confused.

An artist has decided to have an art exhibit on the most beautiful mathematical and physical equations. A physicist has becomed the art critic.

First, I have to applaud the spirit of the exhibit. The selection of equations was a pretty good one being both representative and meaningful. The font was also carefully chosen, having that crisp and classical LaTeX look. And it is generally accepted that the standard document LaTeX font was made to the image of God's word, being both practical and beautiful.

Beauty

Euler's equation is beauty in its simplicity and elegance. Combining trigonometry, complex numbers, the natural numbers, and the identity for both addition and multiplication, it would be hard to imagine an exhibit without this one as its main piece.

Godspeed

Lagrange's equations of motion are to mechanics what Michelangelo's David is to the human body. Once you see it, you know you have seen all there is to perfection. All the conservation laws (ie. Momentum, Position) can be derived from it, and with them, all of Newton's Laws. The excellent choice of canonical variables makes it as general as possible.

Let there be light

Maxwell's equations of light were one of the biggest achievements of unification of physical phenomena, combining the nature of electricity, magnetism and light. It is shown in its differential form, showing the careful taste of the artist. Terms related to magnetic monopoles are missing, suggesting the lack of understanding of the priviledged position of quantized electric charge.

Entanglement

Quantum Entanglement is one of the most misunderstood and central concepts of the last 100 years of physics. Einstein introduced it in his famous EPR Paper as his attempt to destroy quantum mechanics; now it has becomed the resource of quantum computation, what unites everything in the universe in what seems to go faster than the speed of light, and what gives rise to the classicality of the perceived nature. My only gripe is, why a triplet? Why not the singlet Bell State?

Music

Fourier's transform feels a little out of place in this exhibit that has achieved so much by trying to be as general as possible. Fourier's transform is a very useful integral transform, but why not show a more general integral transform? What about Hilbert's transform, connecting dual spaces with analytic continuation?

1 comment:

Phobos said...

Ojalá me pasara más a menudo que una chica se impresionara tanto con mi nerdería que me pidiera sexo.