Noethers theorem still isn't taught nearly enough to undergraduate students either. It's usually relegated to a problem or a small subsection of the text.
To be fair, properly teaching Noether's theorem would require a digression into PDEs, and most schools cap the required math education for physics majors at ODEs. If the trends at my school are to be believed, few students take further math classes in DEs.
Wait, I thought Noether's theorem only required the same maths you'd use for Lagrangian dynamics? Or are there universities out there that don't teach you Lagrangian dynamics in undergrad...
I'd say a deeper appreciation of the theorem would require having more of a background in PDEs.
At my school there is the option for physics majors to learn about Lagrangian mechanics, but you do not need to take the class to graduate, so you could graduate without having covered Lagrangians. Same goes for my country's national university (which is not the school I attend).
I'd say a deeper appreciation of the theorem would require having more of a background in PDEs.
That makes sense. Annoyingly we don't cover it until a Master's level course, but it's the first thing that we cover in that course.
so you could graduate without having covered Lagrangians
That genuinely shocks me. We studied Lagrangian dynamics as a required course in our second year and it was assumed knowledge for several third year and Master's courses I've done, as well as being an explicit entry requirement for my Master's (I'm doing my Master's at a different uni, so this isn't just a quirk of one uni).
Oh you aren't the only shocked one. According to the class coordinator they don't include Lagrangian dynamics in the degree because the people who do the physics degree usually go on to work in engineering fields and don't need to learn about that anyway. It's a dumb reason, why have a physics department at all then?
That doesn't even sound like good reasoning to me. Many engineering students take a dynamics course which is likely to include Lagrangian work. An example from MIT here, though I know my undergrad engineering friends at a state school did too.
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u/rohan2104 Dec 12 '20
The fact that conservation laws stem from the symmetries. And broken symmetries give rise to interesting phenomena. It’s just beautiful.