View Single Post
Old 11-07-2004, 10:16 PM   #9 (permalink)
stingc
Psycho
 
Location: PA
There are so many neat theorems, but I'd have to say Noether's is my favorite. It essentially states that any continuous symmetry has a conserved quantity associated to it. In newtonian mechanics, this shows that the conservation of energy is equivalent to saying that our label for time=0 is arbitrary. Similarly, momentum conservation comes from invariance under translations and angular momentum conservation is equivalent to rotational symmetry.
stingc is offline  
 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73