this post was submitted on 26 May 2024
145 points (100.0% liked)
196
16087 readers
2090 users here now
Be sure to follow the rule before you head out.
Rule: You must post before you leave.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I like to think of it as a big list of extremely complicated instructions that you can follow to see how different types of particles interact in the standard model.
There's a lot of different phenomena that you can derive from it, but my favourite is that if you know what you're doing, you can just read possible interactions off of it.
It's also unnecessarily complicated, I've never seen someone have to use the full thing, you can get rid of a lot of it when you only care about specific particles. Part of the complication is that it's some insanely dense notation, it's actually far larger than it appears and contains lots of really complicated mathematical objects with some wild properties.
(And to the pendants, yes this is an equation for quantum fields and not particles exactly, but that's never easy to explain)