Sunday, August 21, 2016

My 5 Fave Physics Equations

Should I write in English? Hmmm.. It will need more energy, but let's try!
So.. These are my 5 fave physics equations. 

1. Newton Universal Gravitation
I knew this when I was in my last year of my primary school. I read it in a general encyclopedia about planets. Every two planets will attract each other with a force called 'gravity', and the force will decrease with the distance between them. Yes. It sound so 'biasa ajah'. :D But this was before I realized that the law is valid for each two masses in the universe! (That's why they called it 'universal'). Even two small peebles on the ground will attract each other. It was so mind-blowing for me. Since then I started fanz-girling Mr. Newton. He's an INTJ, btw. The cold-cool-long-haired guy. Hahaha. 


2. Bernoulli Equation
This equation, compared with the others, is a bit technical and concrete. This equation tells us how to fly. :D Especially for planes. I always had some kind of feeling with airplanes. Everytime I went to the airport seeing them park in the field, it gives me a sense of longing, and hope (for adventure?). But I think kids at my age will have a great attraction for planes. Can you imagine, a tiny small pin, can not even float in the air, but the super big aeroplane could fly, with all the heavy things inside it? Well, the equation say yes. It just need to have a special shape called 'streamline'. Next, it just need to move, and tilt a bit with an inclination angle. Then it flies. It's that simple (well of course there are much more technical thing in airplane). Very cool.

Einstein Field Equation
"Spacetime tells matter how to move, matter tells spacetime how to curve". Nothing more to say. :D

Yang-Mills Equation (..and Bianchi Identity)
 
The physics of these equations is not really obvious. The Yang-Mills equation is the second one, the one with a star in it. We will need a bit advance math to understand completely: d is the.. well, I always write it in my notes as EXTCODEV -exterior covariant derivative, and the star, is the Hodge operator. Yes it needs differential forms. Ngaaa. -____-  The first equation is the Bianchi Identity, and, just like the name, it is an identity which is automatically satisfied by the curvature of every fibre-bundle. OK so all these sound like they are from other planets, but, for a special case, where the gauge group is U1, these two relations will give Maxwell Equations! Well maybe I should write Maxwell instead of Yang-Mills, they are already beautiful.

Canonical Commutation Relation
 
Here comes the quantum world. All the fuzzy things, waveparticle duality, wave function etc, comes from this equation (well it comes from a procedure called as first canonical quantization, to be precise). It also gives Heisenberg uncertainty principle. For me, it seems that the 'moral of the story' from quantum mechanics is that.. Nature prevents us to obtain complete information about the world. Like there is a limit in the amount of information we can obtain from a measurement. I don't know if this is correct.. still a lot of mysteries in the quantum world.
So these are my fave 5 equations in physics. If I could add two more equations, they would be:

Shannon Informational Entropy
  
I forget the minus. :D Well this is not an equation directly from physics, it's much more general. The one we use in physics has a constant KB in it, the Boltzmann constant.


Dirac Equation