Stephen comments on No Individual Particles - Less Wrong

15 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 18 April 2008 04:40AM

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Comment author: Stephen 18 April 2008 05:36:56PM 0 points [-]

Psy-Kosh: I don't know. Certainly in practice it seems to be useful to focus a lot on the group of symmetries of a system. In the example we discussed the swapping properties were basically the group of permutations of labels leaving the wavefunction invariant. (Or the group of permutations leaving the Hamiltonian invariant in the other example.) I think special relativity can be stated as "the Lagrangian of the universe is invariant under the Lorentz group." So, although I don't know whether swapping properties and so forth are the essence of things, they certainly seem to be important and useful to analyze.