The group of all transformations that preserve some bilinear form, notable examples:
- orthogonal group preserves the inner product
- unitary group preserves a Hermitian form
- Lorentz group preserves the Minkowski inner product
TODO motivation. Motivation. Motivation. Motivation. The definitin with quotient group is easy to understand.
Full set of all possible special relativity symmetries:
In simple and concrete terms. Suppose you observe N particles following different trajectories in Spacetime.
There are two observers traveling at constant speed relative to each other, and so they see different trajectories for those particles:Note that the first two types of transformation are exactly the non-relativistic Galilean transformations.
- space and time shifts, because their space origin and time origin (time they consider 0, i.e. when they started their timers) are not synchronized. This can be modelled with a 4-vector addition.
- their space axes are rotated relative to one another. This can be modelled with a 4x4 matrix multiplication.
- and they are moving relative to each other, which leads to the usual spacetime interactions of special relativity. Also modelled with a 4x4 matrix multiplication.
The Poincare group is the set of all matrices such that such a relationship like this exists between two frames of reference.
The direct product of two cyclic groups of coprime order is another cyclic group by
Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Our notation: , called "dihedral group of degree n", means the dihedral group of the regular polygon with sides, and therefore has order (all rotations + flips), called the "dihedral group of order 2n".
17 of them.
All possible repetitive crystal structures!
219 of them.
"Water" is the name for both:
- the chemical compound with chemical formula H2O
- the liquid phase of the chemical substance composed of the above chemical compound
Simplified phase diagram of water
. Source. Note the triple point and critical point visible. Phase diagrams are so cool! The lower level you go into a computer, the harder it is to observe things by
Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
The most extreme case of this is of course the integrated circuit itself, in which it is essentially impossible (?) to observe the specific value of some indidual wire at some point.
Somewhat on the other extreme, we have high level programming languages running on top of an operating system: at this point, you can just GDB step debug your program, print the value of any variable/memory location, and fully understand anything that you want. Provided that you manage to easily reach that point of interest.
And for anything in between we have various intermediate levels of complication. The most notable perhaps being developing the operating system itself. At this level, you can't so easily step debug (although techniques do exist). For early boot or bootloaders for example, you might want to use JTAG for example on real hardware.
In parallel to this, there is also another very important pair of closely linked tradeoffs:
- the lower level at which something is implemented, the faster it runs
- emulation gives you observability back, at the cost of slower runtime
Emulation also has another potential downside: unless you are very careful at implementing things correctly, your model might not be representative of the real thing. Also, there may be important tradeoffs between how much the model looks like the real thing, and how fast it runs. For example, QEMU's use of binary translation allows it to run orders of magnitude faster than gem5. However, you are unable to make any predictions about system performance with QEMU, since you are not modelling key elements like the cache or CPU pipeline.
Instrumentation is another technique that has can be considered to achieve greater observability.
The term loosely refers to certain layers of the computer abstraction layers hierarchy, usually high level hardware internals like CPU pipeline, caching and the memory system. Basically exactly what gem5 models.
Subtle is the Lord by Abraham Pais (1982) mentions that this has a good summary of the atomic theory evidence that was present at the time, and which had become basically indisputable at or soon after that date.
On Wikimedia Commons since it is now public domain in most countries: commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Perrin,_Jean_-_Les_Atomes,_F%C3%A9lix_Alcan,_1913.djvu
An English translation from 1916 by English chemist Dalziel Llewellyn Hammick on the Internet Archive, also on the public domain: archive.org/details/atoms00hammgoog
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