Math Rule

VOwOxel@discuss.tchncs.de to 196@lemmy.blahaj.zone – 146 points –

What even is this?

28

This is the "Lagrangian standard model" - the mathematical formula explaining basically all physics as we know it.

https://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/the-deconstructed-standard-model-equation?language_content_entity=und

When you DON'T assume spherical chickens in a vacuum, this is what you gotta calculate.

assume spherical chickens in a vacuum

lol that’s the next multiverse over, our solution works only with spherical cows in a vacuum.

Oh man, that' explains it. I've been using spherical swallows, which are roughly coconut sized. So really just use coconut maths.

lol yfw you realize you coulda just used cubic swallows and called it a day

The SM is half the puzzle. The other half being Einstein’s field equations (which, despite the beautiful notation, are just as complex). Also, I will note that there are some spherical chickens in this equation as well—like massless neutrinos.

Well, it's a weightless chicken at least, because this model's got no gravity.

Adding to the other answers... This is kind of just "for show" in that most of the time you only use the relevant terms, I can't even imagine what type of problem you'd have to be solving to need to write all this out. Really it's just "here are all of the interactions" and not "oh shit we have to do some particle physics stuff get out the monster equation."

They add ... sometimes to signify that they're just taking pieces.

I assume one of the only scenarios in which you’d need to use this full Lagrangian is when developing a virtual universe whose laws mirror the Standard Model of Particle Physics. We’re nowhere near even close to being able to do that in any genuine capacity, at least not until our quantum computing gets up off the ground and properly developed.

I mean, someone must have done this, right? Plop it all into a computer and then crank up the number of particles to see if you can get anything useful out of it.

It's the exercise they put in the test after you spent 5 hours of your life trying to understand the dinky ones they put in the book.

This is the best current demonstration of The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in Describing Reality.

Did you mean Physics Rule?

Anyway, yeah, if you fully expand the terms, you get something like that. Nobody ever accused modern physics of being simple.

PBS Space Time explains it...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHiyQID7SBs

But I still don't understand it

BTW use Piped for this link - just getting ahead of the Piped bot

I like to think of it as a big list of extremely complicated instructions that you can follow to see how different types of particles interact in the standard model.

There's a lot of different phenomena that you can derive from it, but my favourite is that if you know what you're doing, you can just read possible interactions off of it.

It's also unnecessarily complicated, I've never seen someone have to use the full thing, you can get rid of a lot of it when you only care about specific particles. Part of the complication is that it's some insanely dense notation, it's actually far larger than it appears and contains lots of really complicated mathematical objects with some wild properties.

(And to the pendants, yes this is an equation for quantum fields and not particles exactly, but that's never easy to explain)

I'm always a little ashamed that my brain blorps internally black with anything higher than basic division, but it is visually quite pleasing!

Though, when I look at it for more than a few seconds, am I supposed to see the 3D Klingon Bird of Prey?