EP 14 · 10:31

No special place in space or time

From Chen Ning Yang — The Man Who Unlocked Symmetry

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10:31position in the solar system or something like that. Obviously, if you're trying to like measure stars or something, yeah, you're not going to >> sure. Yeah. You know, but if if you're doing something with subatomic particles or like gravitational waves, then >> yeah, whatever whatever thing I'm doing now is the same as what I'll be doing tomorrow is the same as what I'll be doing in a month and so on and so forth. Is this the kind of the where this idea of longitud longitudinal studies come from where you have these long period of time where you're just replicating the same experiment in order to see the impacts like over generational differences or any other kind of category but because you have this symmetry in time. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. you

11:12at least can trust that the laws of physics aren't changing. Yeah. Yeah. That's if if that weren't true, then it's like whatever thing you're doing, it's like, oh, well, you did it a month later, right? [laughter] But so so there is this there is this like underlying notion that whatever the laws of physics are today are going to be the same as the laws of physics tomorrow and the day after, right? Um, >> and another one is the rotation in space. Okay? If I have an if if I have an apparatus that's oriented this way and then I just rotate the whole thing, as long as like I rotate everything that has to do with my experiment, my experiment should yield the same

11:54results right? >> Makes sense? >> So all of these things are symmetries. The fact that I can change my experiment in a way but the physics remains the same. This is underlying like you know the fact that I can replicate experiments and if I do an experiment and I publish something with all the methods somebody from the other side of the world can actually replicate that experiment. >> It's the bedrock of the scientific

From the episode
  1. EP 14

    Chen Ning Yang — The Man Who Unlocked Symmetry

    Chen Ning Yang, parity violation, and the birth of Yang–Mills.

    Chen Ning Yang — The Man Who Unlocked Symmetry

Nobel PrizeStandard ModelSymmetryParticle Physics