Re:Emmy Noether changed the course of physics
by andrepd on Tuesday May 26, 2015 @05:06PM
(#9607658)
Precisely. She didn't "change the course of physics" at all. Nothing in her work was a massive paradigm shift. She didn't shape the field for decades to come. Einstein did that, with special and general relativity. Him, Planck, de Broglie and all that crowd did that with quantum theory. Noether's theorem is beautiful, powerful and amazingly profound, and she definitely deserves way, way more recognition than she gets. But it's wrong to say that she "changed the course of physics".
[ Parent
| on HN ]
Re:Emmy Noether changed the course of physics
by drjesusphd on Tuesday May 26, 2015 @05:20PM
(#9607733)
> Nothing in her work was a massive paradigm shift. She didn't shape the field for decades to come.
I disagree. Quantum field theories are often expressed as a collection of symmetries. The ever-successful Standard Model is:
SU(3) × SU(2) × U(1)
Everything else follows because of Noether's theorem. And by "everything", I mean, "every phenomena in the universe that we are aware of except for gravity".
Re:Emmy Noether changed the course of physics
by cdwhite on Wednesday May 27, 2015 @02:08AM
(#9609585)
Well, to be fair, you actually also have to put in some numbers, too: masses, mixing angles, coupling constants, and the Higgs vacuum expectation value. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Model#Construction_of... .) But, yeah, that symmetry description is incredibly powerful.
Re:Emmy Noether changed the course of physics
by zornthewise on Tuesday May 26, 2015 @07:00PM
(#9608230)
I have no idea about physics but Noether(with Artin) certainly changed the mathematical landscape. She was probably the first person to really do modern algebra(building on Dedekind) and is the first person whose works really seem modern.