Second channel video:
https://youtu.be/FWjl5ZuBs3s
The action principle has always been deeply unsatisfying to me. Why cook up this quantity? Why should we minimise it? I finally found a satisfying answer, which is made more satisfying by Noether's theorem.
This channel is meant to showcase interesting but underrated maths (and physics) topics and approaches, either with completely novel topics, or a well-known topic with a novel approach. If the novel approach resonates better with you, great! But the videos have never meant to be pedagogical - in fact, please please PLEASE do NOT use YouTube videos to learn a subject.
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Go to https://www.mathemaniac.co.uk/download and enter the following password: actionistautological
Sources:
This video is basically an amalgamation of the paper:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-39145-y
(with more details here: https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fs41598-023-39145-y/MediaObjects/41598_2023_39145_MOESM1_ESM.pdf) and the Wikipedia article on Noether’s theorem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noether%27s_theorem#Brief_illustration_and_overview_of_the_concept
However, I do have to warn that the paper uses pretty unconventional notations, which were confusing to me at first, so I have changed the notations considerably.
Rabbit holes to dive into:
Ostrogradsky instability: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostrogradsky_instability
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1209.0583
https://www.ctc.cam.ac.uk/activities/cosmo2013/presentations/Tai-junChen.pdf (a presentation of the former preprint)
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2403.19777
Cleverly choosing coordinates to make vector field divergenceless: https://hal.science/hal-04215419/document
(Are there similar works to this? Please let me know.)
https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/432664/is-every-autonomous-first-order-planar-2d-system-integrable/432672#432672
(Seems like this is quite a general argument for a 2D system - I don’t have access to the book referenced, so maybe there are more details for higher-dimensional systems)
Hamilton-Jacobi equations: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1910.09414
https://www.math.wustl.edu/~alanchang/files/alan_chang_junior_paper_hamilton_jacobi_equations.pdf
Video chapters:
00:00 Intro
00:41 Alternative definition of action
04:36 Why action is integral of T - V
07:07 Gauge dependence of action
12:00 Why minimise S?
16:23 Noether's theorem
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