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Should we be astonished by the Principle of “Least” Action?
September 28, 2014 by Abel Molina 11 Comments
In many of the expositions of the use of action in physics (see e.g. this one), I perceive an attempt at transmitting wonder about the world being such that it minimizes a function on its trajectory. This has indeed been the case historically, with Maupertuis supposed to have considered action minimization (and the corresponding unification of minimization principles between optics and mechanics) as the most definite proof available to him of the existence of God. However, along the spirit of this stack exchange question, I never really understood why such a wonder should be felt, even setting aside the fact that it assumes that our equations “are” the world, a perspective that Artem has criticized at length before.
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Filed under Commentary Tagged with philosophy of science, theoretical physics