What did Emmy Noether reveal about the Universe?

Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe

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Astronomy, Physics, Science, Natural Sciences

4.6 • 2.5K Ratings

🗓️ 20 March 2025

⏱️ 59 minutes

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Summary

Daniel and Kelly talk about the life and underappreciated contribution of mathematician and accidental physicist Emmy Noether

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Transcript

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0:00.0	The universe is like a big puzzle. It's a mystery for us to unravel. But it's not just a heaping pile of unorganized facts. There are patterns to the madness. There are clues that suggest a deep underlying organization. For example, if you multiply mass and velocity together, something we call
0:22.5	momentum, you get a number, which the universe seems to respect. You calculate the momentum of
0:28.8	a bunch of rocks, you get some number. Then you bang them into each other, change their
0:32.6	directions, break them into pieces, whatever. You calculate the momentum again, same number. The universe respects
0:38.9	this number, conserves this weird combination of mass and velocity. Why does it care about mass
0:45.2	times velocity? Why does it not care about mass times acceleration or mass times ice cream
0:49.6	or chocolate times velocity? For a long time, we had no idea. We just saw that it did respect this.
0:56.3	Until a genius came along, a mathematician who, during a brief dabble in physics, made
1:01.1	a connection that explained it all.
1:03.5	Emmy Neuther pulled back a layer of reality to show us the deep underlying mechanism
1:08.4	behind these conservation laws.
1:10.6	And not just about momentum, about
1:12.2	anything the universe respects and conserves. Without her equation, we wouldn't have understood
1:17.6	the beautiful mathematics, the foundation of the standard model. We wouldn't have discovered
1:21.7	the Higgs boson. So in honor of Emmy Nother's 143rd birthday, we're going to be diving into
1:27.1	her life and her work.
1:29.2	Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's extraordinarily momentous universe.
1:50.9	Hello, I'm Kelly Weiner-Smith. I study parasites, and I get less symmetrical with any. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I'm getting rounder and rounder. I'm not sure
1:58.5	it was happening over there. I might have both of those
2:02.2	things happening concurrently, but it's okay. You know, the nice thing about getting older is that I
2:06.0	care way less than I used to. So, you know, freedom in that regard. I like to think that I'm
2:11.2	approaching a spherical physicist, which is the approximation most physicists would make about
	...

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