If I was a physics phd working on QFT, I would tattoo this equation as a sleeve. Unfortunately, as a mere programmer, I could never pick a sufficiently perfect code snippet to use. I would constantly look at it and try to refactor it.
The Deconstructed Standard Model Equation
21–30 of 58 posts
Re: The Deconstructed Standard Model Equation
#22"Note: ...In Gutierrez’s dissemination of the transcript, he noted a sign error he made somewhere in the equation. Good luck finding it!"
Anyone see the flipped sign?
Re: The Deconstructed Standard Model Equation
#23What is the sum of terms supposed to be equal to?
It's a Lagrangian, so this is the function nature tries to minimize. In common everyday systems, the Lagrangian is kinetic energy minus potential energy.
True, but with nitpick that it is the Lagrangian density so nature minimises its total over a region of 4-space.
And with the more important nitpick that this Lagrangian is a quantum operator rather than a number. In some sense nature does try to minimise it even so, but I never got an intuitive grasp on what that sense is.
Re: The Deconstructed Standard Model Equation
#24I haven't seen an article so math intensive in a while... since I saw this one: http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Bayesian_Ying_Yang_learn...
The article displays a big equation somewhat carefully. But it doesn't have any maths.
Re: The Deconstructed Standard Model Equation
#25If I was a physics phd working on QFT, I would tattoo this equation as a sleeve. Unfortunately, as a mere programmer, I could never pick a sufficiently perfect code snippet to use. I would constantly look at it and try to refactor it.
Re: The Deconstructed Standard Model Equation
#26Given the world we live in, right now, why does mathematics continue to insist on minified expressions? Given the option, most development teams would choose to read and write against verbose source code, rather than scrape obfuscated variables and method signatures out of a minified, transpiled, compressed package. So why do we continue this archaic practice of obscure, inscrutable symbols in mathematics? Cultural i…
Your assessment is somewhat unfair and kind of misguided. The differences between math and programming are quite large. I think there are two main reasons for why we have symbols in math and more verbose expressions in programming.
1. Medium. Math is mainly done with pen/pencil on paper, or chalk on a blackboard, or marker on a whiteboard. Programming is mainly done with keyboard on a computer. Those media are quite different. In a way, it's about ease of input - it's easier to write out a longer name with keyboard than with a pen.
2. Nature of the activity. A lot of math boils down to manipulating expressions given rules. It involves a lot of scratch work with a lot of backtracking and trying new things. A lot of programming boils down to easily reading and writing code and reasoning about how things work. Imagine writing "integral from a to b of f(x) dx" or "integral(f(x), x, a, b)" by hand a hundred times vs in an IDE and you'll see what I mean.
Re: The Deconstructed Standard Model Equation
#27If I was a physics phd working on QFT, I would tattoo this equation as a sleeve. Unfortunately, as a mere programmer, I could never pick a sufficiently perfect code snippet to use. I would constantly look at it and try to refactor it.
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/loom/files/2008/07/y-combi...
Nice Y combinator lol. Still more math than code.
Re: The Deconstructed Standard Model Equation
#28Given the world we live in, right now, why does mathematics continue to insist on minified expressions? Given the option, most development teams would choose to read and write against verbose source code, rather than scrape obfuscated variables and method signatures out of a minified, transpiled, compressed package. So why do we continue this archaic practice of obscure, inscrutable symbols in mathematics? Cultural i…
Your comment shows a common misunderstanding of what mathematicians are trying to do. Modern mathematical notation is not obfuscated, it is in fact making the object being described much easier to perceive for humans.
Explaining the equation you see in English words is what every physics book does, however the equation itself represents a concept that is not human. It comes from an alien universe of symmetries and relations and we have spent centuries to arrive at the current way of writing these down in a way which makes them easy to work with.
You can formulate the solution to a quadratic equation as:
The negative linear term, added and subtracted from the square root of the quantity which is the difference between the square of the linear term and the product of four times the constant term and the quadratic term, all divided by twice the quadratic term.
Modern mathematicians write:
x = (-b +- sqrt(b^2 - 4ac)) / 2a
The difference is night and day. You cannot remove the essential complexity from a problem. You can only try to get close to its representation.
Re: The Deconstructed Standard Model Equation
#29Given the world we live in, right now, why does mathematics continue to insist on minified expressions? Given the option, most development teams would choose to read and write against verbose source code, rather than scrape obfuscated variables and method signatures out of a minified, transpiled, compressed package. So why do we continue this archaic practice of obscure, inscrutable symbols in mathematics? Cultural i…
Your comment shows a common misunderstanding of what mathematicians are trying to do. Modern mathematical notation is not obfuscated, it is in fact making the object being described much easier to perceive for humans. Explaining the equation you see in English words is what every physics book does, however the equation itself represents a concept that is not human. It comes from an alien universe of symmetries and re…
Though I can't speak for the parent post's author, applying that post's spirit to your example would instead yield, for the quadratic formula:
'The negative linear term, added and subtracted from the square root of the discriminant, all divided by twice the quadratic term'; then before or after this you'd define the discriminant, as it's an illuminating concept in its own right.
I see the target of this wishful thinking a sort-of middle-ground between a formula's derivation/proof and its compact form.
Re: The Deconstructed Standard Model Equation
#30Given the world we live in, right now, why does mathematics continue to insist on minified expressions? Given the option, most development teams would choose to read and write against verbose source code, rather than scrape obfuscated variables and method signatures out of a minified, transpiled, compressed package. So why do we continue this archaic practice of obscure, inscrutable symbols in mathematics? Cultural i…
That's not how math statements work.
You think mathematicians are minifying/uglifying their 'code' in the same way that one might use switch/case or ternary expressions instead of if/else if/else statements: in the name of concision/premature optimisation.
However, what the mathematical language is really doing is more akin to what jQuery is doing for JavaScript: it wraps low-level, complex and at times verbose mathematical statements into simpler representations.
Minification !== abstraction/syntactic sugar.