pyrrhus

joined 1 year ago
[–] pyrrhus@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago

I think the concept is even more beautiful than you described:

A symmetry in a physical system implies a conservation law.

As a physicist, since the beginning of your studies you learn to appreciate and seek symmetries in various systems. At first, it’s mostly on an intuitive way to help you understand or simplify a problem. But at some point you learn about Noether’s theorem and see the even deeper meaning and power of symmetries.

For example, symmetry in movement in space (meaning I can move my entire system and it stays the same) implies conservation of momentum.

And symmetry in time translation (meaning if move the entire system a through a same interval in time and it still behaves the same way) implies conservation of energy.